Puts a new slant on the term "Wet riser"...
Nasty BOFHses. It burns us! It burns...
"Where's my car park gone?" I ask Security as I wander into the building in a very irritated manner. "What car park?" Security asks "My Car park. Basement level 2. Right beside the lifts. Now apparently somewhere inside a large concrete room." "Oh, that. Well we can't really talk about that." "How about a hint?" "I... …
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Friday 23rd August 2013 08:46 GMT Phil O'Sophical
And so very real...
Some years ago a colleague told me of a block of new flats near his home. 12 stories, all the same layout, and shortly after it opened the inhabitants began to complain about the terrible smell permeating the building.
Investigation showed a basement calf-deep in raw sewage. Seems that with all the flats the same, all the bathrooms were above each other. From convenience or laziness, all the toilets were connected to one vertical downpipe, which made a right-angle turn across the ceiling once it reached the basement. As my colleague put it "no-one had calculated the terminal velocity of a turd after falling 12 stories". After enough sustained impacts the downflow had punched the elbow off the pipe...
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Friday 23rd August 2013 09:05 GMT Neil Barnes
Right-angle poo
Happened to me fitting out a TV/Radio studio in Paris one time. Five stories of cast iron poo-pipe (I'm sure there's a technical name), right angle bend across our ceiling, not touched for fifty years until our contractors nudged it... it was quite, um, impressive when we discovered it.
Paris, because.
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Friday 23rd August 2013 16:08 GMT Dr Dan Holdsworth
A short, sharp shower of...
Every so often, students in new halls of residence (or old halls that they don't like very much) come up with a Cunning Plan to test out the pressure-resistance of the sewage arrangements. This is actually very easy to do, by simply flushing every lavatory in the building as nearly simultaneously as possible, and because most sanitary engineers don't bother to build the pipework to the massively over-engineered level needed to survive this sort of pressure, the results are predictably messy.
Normally the pipes in the basement burst and overflow, or the ground-floor toilets overflow massively.
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Sunday 25th August 2013 15:58 GMT Fatman
As my colleague put it "no-one had calculated the terminal velocity of a turd after falling 12 stories". After enough sustained impacts the downflow had punched the elbow off the pipe...
Then they must have very poor engineers/architects design buildings.
Back in the '70's when I was in construction, working on a 23 story, the vertical sewer mains had a set of 4 45 degree ells every 6 floors, creating what the plumbers sarcastically referred to as a 'shit break'.
This caused the flow to turn 45 degrees to the left, then straight down, then 45 degrees to the right, and finally, straight down. This "jogging" insured that the turds got "broken up".
Flush that architect.
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Monday 26th August 2013 17:04 GMT Version 1.0
Years ago my parents watched a local builder put in a bathroom for the cottage across the street in the village where we lived in north Oxfordshire - they knew where the main sewer was because they had put a bathroom into our house but they could never figure out how the builder had connected the bathroom to the public sewer given the layout of the house.
Some 40 years later the little old lady across the street died and my dad was asked to help her relatives owners sort out the deeds so that they could sell the house. He said that he thinks he must have been the first person to visit the cellar in 40 years - it was about 4 feet deep in compacted sewage. The bathroom waste had just been piped straight into the cellar and drained out through the floor ... these were very old houses, stone walls and stone floors laid about 400-500 years old.
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Friday 23rd August 2013 09:44 GMT Graham Marsden
@Ragarath - Re: The Smell!
Surprisingly not.
A market I sell at used to be in a basement venue, the toilets of which emptied into a large tank that then pumped the effluent into the sewers. Unfortunately the day before the market the piping broke and the venue ended up ankle deep in....
They brought in a specialist cleaning company and by the next day you wouldn't even have known there was a problem except for the fact that the concrete floors were the cleanest they'd ever been!
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Friday 23rd August 2013 11:10 GMT theblackhand
Re: cash flow
I don't know... I'm sure execs wading in sewage for 48 hours would be classed as high quality TV compared to some of the reality TV shows currently on TV.
"Vote now for what you would like staff to eat at the next cafeteria meal. Dial 80001 for Vindaloo for the fifth consecutive meal, dial 80002 for corn, dial 80003 for asparagus soup, dial 80004 for all of the above...."
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Friday 23rd August 2013 09:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
'Johnny Cash 10th anniversary memorial chicken Vindaloo'
Reminds me of the time my last company promised everyone lunch in the middle of a day long meeting, they got a local cafe to deliver a big pot of curry and a big pot of chilli con carne.
Needless to say, the afternoon meeting kept getting interrupted by visits to the traps.
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Friday 23rd August 2013 14:04 GMT Stevie
Bah!
That didn't go where I expected it to go.
I was thinking of piping in footage from DEFCON4 and The Stand along with hijacking the internet feed and rerouting it in order to control the story going in and nab the footage coming out, which would be sold as the latest and greatest Reality Show - Bunker Survivors of World War III.
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Friday 23rd August 2013 14:43 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Not sure which is worse...
... what he did, or the fact I had the thought to do the same as soon as I read where the safe room was. I wouldn't have cut the comms, though, as it would have been been even sweeter to have the big-wigs call to have their bunker busted once they realized their just how deep it was going to get.
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Saturday 24th August 2013 00:17 GMT Herby
And to think that today...
Our "datacenter" is partially off the air because of a "blown fuse". It seems that this type of fuse is not your common 3AG, or 20mm type, but rather some big huge high voltage type that needs to be flown in from a state away. It should be back up in a little bit though!
Yes, the 'datacenter' is in the lowest level of the set of buildings. I don't believe it is below grade though (we're on a hill).