Scenes of Prison
54. Sewer Sabotage in Segregation
“M ister Larsen! Mister Larsen!”
Wham! Wham! Wham!
“Mister Larsen! Mister Larsen!”
Wham! Wham! Wham!
The cries of alarm and pounding on the door were loud and frequent and coming from the lower tier of rooms on the wing side of the Disciplinary Segregation Unit.
I glanced at my watch.
“Mister Larsen! Mister Larsen! Come quick! You’ve got to do something!”
I followed the cries and the pounding, and I went to a room on the lower tier at the end of the walkway, but I knew what was wrong before I even got there.
“Look, look,” cried the inmate who was standing inside his room pointing at the toilet. “I didn’t do anything. It’s going to overflow! You’ve got to do something! You’ve got to stop it!”
The toilet in his room was filled to the brim with a soupy, smelly mix of brown and gray water swimming with debris. Plumbers call it “black water.” It was raw sewage. The situation demanded the immediate use of my best plumber triage skills.
“Get everything off the floor,” I instructed.
Then, I quickly checked nearby rooms. Other neighboring rooms had toilets rapidly filling, too. As I found other toilets with rapidly rising water, I pounded on the doors and loudly instructed the inmates inside “Get everything off the floor. Get everything up.”
Next, I raced upstairs to the tier of rooms directly above those with flooding toilets, and I went room to room.
“Don’t flush your toilets, don’t run any water in your sinks.” I delivered this message to each of the eight rooms on the top tier.
“Why?” “What’s wrong?” “What if I have to shit?” came the replies.
“The sewer is blocked. Everything you send down your toilets or your sinks is coming out on the floors of the rooms below you. "Don’t flush your toilets!” I said again.
There was nothing I could do on the lower tier of rooms to stop the toilets from overflowing, but there was something I could do on the top tier. I could instruct inmates to stop sending water down their sewer pipes and enforce this instruction by turning off the water to rooms whose inmates ignored my instruction.
This blockage, and nearly all the sewer blockages I dealt with over the years, was not a random accident. It was a deliberate act of sabotage.
Here’s the background.
By early afternoon in the Segregation Unit, most of the day’s routine tasks have been completed. If it was a shower day, everyone has now showered. If it was a room cleaning day, all the rooms have now been cleaned. Most of the exercise yards have been completed, and two of our three meals have been served and the dirty food trays have been picked up. Early afternoon was the time of the day when everyone is wide awake and restless, and confined inmates in Segregation begin to get bored.
When Segregation inmates get bored, they become mischievous, and they often create some drama and excitement to entertain themselves. What better excitement than a little panic among the inmates in the lower tier of rooms and watching a caseworker or two frantically running around the unit who are powerless to stop a flood that an inmate has set in motion.
What fun!
You only needed to flush something down your toilet that would plug up the sewer.
All the toilets at LCC work with a rush of pressurized water pushing the contents of the toilet down the sewer. In our homes, a tank of water produces this sudden flood, but this flood isn’t under high pressure. The stream of water in institutional toilets, like those at LCC, are under high pressure. Inmates have learned to take advantage of this high pressure by gradually feeding large objects into the opening at the back of their toilets and repeatedly flushing them. Their toilets would flush every time they pushed the flush button on the back of their toilets even if it was pushed twenty consecutive times in rapid succession, so inmates could count on a stream of high pressure water to help them feed large objects down the toilet and into the sewer.
On this day, I would not be finding the guilty party. He was one of the inmates on the top tier of rooms standing at his door, looking out his door window, and enjoying the show. Probably the one with the biggest grin, but it was impossible to say which inmate it was.
Once I got control of the flooding, it was time to call maintenance to clear the blockage in the sewer. Their first step was to find it. Their next step was to clear it.
Our plumbers and the inmates they employed (who do the actual work) knew their business, and they had a variety of hand snakes and long power snakes to deploy depending upon what they found. Clearing a blockage can take ten minutes or a couple of hours. Once a blockage was cleared, it was time to bring out the cleaning supplies so inmates could clean up the flooded mess in their cells.
But before the maintenance people left the unit, it was their custom to stop by the office with a plastic bag containing the blockage they had pulled out of the sewer. They were often amazed at the objects inmates had managed to flush down their toilets. On this day, they produced an entire bed sheet.
Maintenance had the last word and the last laugh on these regular acts of sewer sabotage in the Disciplinary Segregation Unit that took so much of their time. They had a suggestion: weld a bar across the opening in the back of the toilets where sewage from the individual toilets emptied into the sewer pipe. Inmates wouldn’t be able to reach this bar, and the placement of this bar across the round opening at the back of the toilets would reduce the size of objects that could get past it by half. Better yet, long objects, like strips of cloth or articles of clothing – or bed sheets – would hang up on the bar. They would still plug up the toilet, but the only toilets that would back up would be those of the inmates who were trying to flush the foreign objects down their toilets to plug up the sewer. They would be the only ones with a mess on the floor that needed to be cleaned up.
It worked. The problem of frequent sewer sabotage was solved, and the frantic cries of alarm of inmates with overflowing toilets flooding their rooms became a thing of the past.
Discussion
- Sabotage to amuse oneself. Kids sometimes do this at school. Did you?
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