Uphill poo?

[G and J]

8 minutes ago, TerryE said:

I was thinking of doing an "Uphill Poo" topic when I saw this one. 

 

By way of background we have a cottage on a Greek Island where we live in spring and autumn, about 4 months of the year.  There isn't any centralised sewage here so every house in the old village has its own cesspit or "votra"; ours (like most) is a ~1m wide covered "stone well (in shape at least)" dug into the path immediately outside the cottage. This works well because the village is on a hill about 300m above  sea level and about 2 km from the sea.  There are so many fissures in the rock plug that the village is built on that liquids rapidly drain away, and the poo (no paper allowed) is a valuable resource to the local flora and fauna, and so is quickly carried off or absorbed, so absolutely no smells at all and AFAIK it has never been emptied in the 50-100 years that it has been there.  The grapevine covering our top terrace thrives on it.  There are maybe 1,000 dwellings on the island, most of which use a similar approach though the large and newer ones have proper septic tanks.

 

The Local Authority has just secured EU funding to replace this distributed solution which works well by a central problem one.   Step one is to put in a sewage system designed by politicians not engineers and to fund local LA workmen.  They've trenched the main road between the old village and the port to add a 160mm main sewer with access manholes next to every house and junction.  The main problem with this is that the pipe is buried about 0.6m below the road surface, and the road is not downhill only as there are often 30m dips over a few hundred metre sections, so the fall gradient varies between about 12° and -5°.  Poocrete plugs and popping manholes will abound.

 

So @G and J it could be worse, you could live on Alonnisos! 🤣

 

 

Good grief. I thought I had crap to deal with!

[TerryE]

Nah,  the biggest fubar was that they decided to build a reservoir on the island sized to sustain a 7-year drought.  To save maybe 5% of the budget they decided the geology meant that they didn't need to line half.  It leaks badly so is never more than about 5% full (Google Earth, here).  The German construction company declared bankruptcy after screwing up more than a dozen water schemes across the Greek Islands.

[SteamyTea]

On 27/05/2024 at 12:49, Jilly said:

bar the electrician

Probably had a traumatic incident at school.