The Tuesday morning smoke test of part of Perry’s sanitary sewer system was carried out within a few hours, but it did not reveal a definite or conclusive explanation for the significant flooding that has occurred in basements in the area.
“The test went really well,” said Perry Public Works Director Jack Butler. “We found maybe four or five cleanouts up next to people’s houses where the lids were broke, but other than that we didn’t really find what we were expecting. We were hoping to maybe find some storm sewers tied in. So it went smooth, but we didn’t find anything real obvious.”
City Administrator Sven Peterson also hoped to find a decisive, Ah-ha! problem the city could solve at once.
“As of now, there’s nothing major that’s glaring at us,” Peterson said. “I was really hoping we’d find an intersection where all the storm intakes were smoking like crazy, but it just didn’t happen. I think we have some spots to look at and areas to fix, and I think the smoke test was well worth the effort.”
Butler said Monday’s rains might have affected the test results.
“We’re also wondering, with all that rain, whether the ground’s so saturated that smoke couldn’t some through it,” he said. “Sometimes if there’s bad spots in lines and it’s good and dry, the smoke works its way out of the ground, but we didn’t see that.”
Butler said the Perry Public Works Department will do a second test in another part of town later this fall or in the spring.
In the meantime, Peterson said, the phased jetting and videotaping of the city’s sanitary sewer system will continue as scheduled.
“We’re just wrapping up phase one and ready to start phase two,” Peterson said. “They were hoping to get another round of video to our engineers for analysis, hopefully this week. I think we’re on track to put together a pretty good grant this fall.”
Peterson told the Perry City Council at its most recent meeting information gained from the smoke test and the phased jetting and videotaping will be used in applying for a federal Community Development Block Grant through the Iowa Economic Development Authority. For now, the mystery of basement flooding in the smoke test zone remains at best only partly solved.
“We’ve either got a whole boatload of sump pumps tied in,” said Butler, “and the citizens aren’t being honest with us, or they don’t know, or else that pipe has some bad spots in it, and it’s acting like a field tile and taking on water also. Could kind of be a combination of both.”
