Imagine walking around your lawn and there’s a slightly wet spot. Each time you walk around your lawn that spot seems wetter and wetter. One day you realize that the waterline from the street to your house runs through that wet spot, so clearly you have a leaking pipe.
Responsibly you call a plumber to come out but they only tell you, “This pipe is pretty new and there’s nothing going on around it to disturb it. There’s no leak.” “Then why is the ground wet here?” “You’re probably imagining it. Here’s my bill.” You know there’s a leak so you call out another plumber who says the same things. As the years go by the soil in that spot becomes squishy and a breeding ground for mushrooms, but every plumber you talk to agrees that pipes that young simply don’t leak. Some plumbers get too distracted by unrelated things on your lawn and decide that the critical issue at hand is actually that tree swing fifty feet away. One plumber even suggests a psychiatrist for you since you clearly are delusional about the pipe having a leak.
Eventually you find a plumber who listens to you and says, “This is a problem! Let’s dig up that soggy dirt and run soil tests on it while we closely examine the pipe!”
They start at the beginning and find a hole. Perfect! They then fix the hole with professional plumbing supplies and immediately the ground begins to dry up! But soon all is wet again and upon inspecting it’s found that for an unknown reason the professional pipe hole fixer isn’t working very well AND there’s a crack a little further down the pipe. There’s nothing that would cause both the hole and the crack, but they both need dealt with. Both are repaired. As time progresses more leaks are discovered and more proven fixes fail. Over and over and over. No plumber who is consulted can find a root cause or a good fix, and some plumbers still insist nothing is wrong. It’s maddening to the plumbers who are working to keep the water flowing rather than pooling, but even more maddening and disheartening to you.
Eventually the plumbers working on your pipe recognize that the more unlikely the situation in general, the more likely it is for your pipe. And while it’s good that they’ve recognized that and can save time in future repairs, it doesn’t actually fix the pipe.
It’s now been eleven years. You currently have a pond in your front yard. None of the plumbers can figure out why your new pipe leaks, but they do keep finding more seemingly unrelated leaks. So there’s no way to tell if you’ll be able to have a normal useable lawn again or if this pond will become a sinkhole, but everyone is just trying to keep it from getting bigger.
thebadgerspath.com 