Stinky Problem

All the time we were boondocking at Tanis and James place in Vernon we were storing our sewage (black tank). When we got to Oliver I hooked up and dumped. I thought the black tank emptied quite quickly - as in not enough time to dump five or six days worth of poop but since I have not had problems with this for years, ignored it.

Until this morning. I got up and discovered a small river of water crossing the hall floor, following the wall to the door and forming a puddle on the ground! The tank was full and PLUGGED! On one of our middle of the night trips to the commode some toilet paper had become lodged in the toilet valve and opened up the water supply very slightly! This kept a slow but steady stream of water flowing which in time (very little) filled the system and overflowed the toilet!

I immediately turned off all the water and used a container to eliminate some of the water out of the toilet. I then checked the position of all the outside valves and tried to dump. Nothing going! After considering all the options I could think of (none of them good) I went to see Nate, the new owner of the Maple Leaf RV Park. He thought the best thing to do was to phone his septic tank guy who thought he could at least empty the tank without the contents ending up on the ground.

He came over and attached his pump onto the black tank and started sucking. This only resulted in the tank looking like it was being collapsed. No good! Next he thought of trying to suck everything out the top and gave me a pipe and valve to try to push down into the tank from the toilet. Well, it met with a little resistance and then it suddenly went down and the tank emptied on it's own! Success!

As he was loading up his equipment I asked him how much and he said that as he had actually done very little, $25 cash for gas would make him happy! Well, that made two of us happy as I was expecting at least four times that amount! I followed up by flushing the tank with my "Magic Wand" and many gallons of high pressure water from Nate's irrigation water supply. All fixed (well after washing the floor that is).

Later on we drove west to the Nighthawk Crossing into the USA and took a drive through backwoods Washington back to Oroville and the border crossing to Osoyoos, BC. We didn't stop except to take photos of several old barns and some landscapes. A great afternoon!