Who Cuts the Corners?

When it comes to “cheap Charlie” systems, who’s responsible? Customers who ask for them? Installers who agree to build them? Or regulators who let it happen?

A recent column by Missouri Smallflows president Janet Murray, in her organization’s newsletter, started me thinking.

Who cuts the corners? When an onsite system is shoddily installed, when a conventional system is put where it clearly doesn’t belong, when a system is undersized for the property and becomes a time bomb, where should the blame fall?

Murray (also environmental health supervisor for the Randolph County Department of Health) found out that a local family was building a new house on the same land as their old one, but using the same driveway. The owners decided they didn’t need a permit for a new onsite system and got “an unregistered person” to put in a septic tank, wrote Murray, who saw the tank while driving by.

To make matters worse, the owners were trying to install a tank and leachfield on a site with soils not suited to such a system. To make a long story short, Murray and the county had to battle the owners until they decided to go with a lagoon and got a permit.

Getting to the root

The question I ultimately asked was: How and why does something like this happen? And when it does, who’s really responsible?

First, the whole mess wouldn’t have started if the homeowners hadn’t thought they might get away with something. Second, it wouldn’t have gone far if no installer had seen fit to take the project. And third ... well, in this case, the regulators ended up doing their job. But what if they hadn’t? (And there are times and places when they don’t.)

As I’ve said before, onsite is one of those industries where a trace of frontier mentality prevails. Rules? Regulations? What the heck, just put the box in the ground, dig the ditches, lay the pipe, cover it all up, and let’s go. Doesn’t matter. Bunch of red tape.

The odd thing is, homeowners who think that way (or just don’t know the rules) can often find someone to do what they want. Owners who are less brazen — who know the rules but want only the dirt-cheapest system they can get, and don’t know the difference between adequate and substandard — almost always find a compliant installer.

The industry’s job

So who’s best equipped to stop it? I’m going to say for the sake of argument that the installer is the critical link in this chain.

Industry members can educate until they’re blue in the face and never get the message through to every person who wants to build a country home. Regulators should be vigilant, of course, and many if not most do their level best, but are we likely to see a time when they have the qualified staff and the resources to be as effective as they might like to be? Not anytime soon. The facts are that homeowners’ wishes would never turn into bad systems if no one were there to build them. And if no bad systems were built, regulators wouldn’t have to worry about them. In a nutshell, no bad system can exist if no installer will build it.

Of course, most installers who read this magazine are also the kind who attend trade shows and seminars, are active in their associations, and hold themselves to high standards of excellence. Clearly the blame for bad systems doesn’t land on them.

Except that maybe the quality installers don’t make enough noise about the ones who are not such good operators. It’s as true in onsite as in many other industries: The relatively few bad actors are tolerated, partly because no one likes to be a snitch, and partly on the old theory of: “Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.”

Maybe in time they do get found out and go out of business (or are forced out), but in the meantime they do damage to their customers and the environment, and they sully the industry’s reputation.

20 letters of wisdom

Am I saying installers are the only ones to blame when systems are built improperly or illegally? No, but they’re a critical line of defense, and arguably the most critical. Preventing bad installations first of all means having unshakable ethics of one’s own, but it also means having zero tolerance for those who are ethically challenged.

Responsible installers, individually or collectively, can’t change the attitudes of irresponsible homeowners or weed out all the disreputable, corner-cutting contractors. But the first step in that direction is to heed a 10-word, 20-letter bit of wisdom I learned once in a leadership class: If it is to be, it is up to me.

All change, all progress, starts with committed individuals. To stop the corner cutting, resolve not to cut any corners yourself, and to take appropriate measures against anyone who does. At any rate, that’s how I see it. What do you think? If you’d like to weigh in, send me a note to editor@onsite installer.com. We’ll gladly publish a selection of comments.



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.