During his time working in Louisiana, both at Rooster Lips and now as the owner of Little Rooster Septic Service, Joshua DeVillier has seen some strange things passing for septic systems here.
“Oh man: I've gone to people's houses and seen that they didn't even have a septic tank,” he says. “The pipe was going straight out to the bayou, in some cases, or straight out to the ditch. Or their septic tank has just been leaking in the yard for 20 years and they're like, ‘oh, we ain't done nothing to that in 20 years. It's just been back here.’ We recently replaced a 5 gallon bucket — barely big enough for a pump to fit in — being used as an effluent pump station.”
Worse yet, “most of the time people don't call you here until it is bad,” he says. “You rarely see a preventive maintenance call. I’m starting to see some now as the health departments are coming in and cracking down on faulty septic systems. But even those: It is like they're going and finding systems that are just oh so bad. Nobody does anything with sewage until it's on the ground or in their house. It's kind of out of sight, out of mind.”
DeVillier has also seen some “professionally installed” septic systems that are mind-bogglingly questionable. “There’s a popular cheap installer around here who has kept us busy replacing his work,” he says. “His pump station is a 55 gallon plastic drum with a hole drilled in the bottom of it so it doesn't pop out of the ground. These are everywhere in our service area. I also see lots of little homemade septic tanks made out of an old fuel tank or old culverts. There's lots of ‘three-jar’ systems still left around here where they just have three old concrete culverts with no bottoms, and they'll just be in series — they'll just go 1, 2, 3 — and then they'll just go right to the ditch. I get calls about these all the time where people are like, ‘Hey man, I'm seeing toilet paper in my ditch. It's time to clean this thing out.’”
