“The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency.”
In order to get connected to the city’s water supply, Tennessee American Water (TAW) needed to come out and tear up the road and connect our house to the main water supply. In order to connect our waste water to the sewer system, we needed to hire a separate group to tear up the road and connect our house to the sewer pipe. Obviously, these cannot be done in conjunction.
What should have happened in an ideal world:
- Road gets torn up.
- House gets connected to the sewer line and the main water line.
- Road gets repaved.
However, when you’re dealing with a system of red tape that does not allow these to be done together and is incapable of doing anything effectively, reality falls far short of expectations.
What really happened:
- Road got torn up by the sewer team.
- House got connected to the sewer system.
- Road got repaved.
- A day later, road got torn up by TAW.
- House got connected to the main water line.
- TAW decided to do the base concrete fill in the rain, and all the concrete washed away.
- A week went by, and there was still a giant hole in the road, even though everyone in the neighborhood had complained. We temporarily covered the hole ourselves with a metal plate to make the road semi-navigable.
- Another city worker came by to create asphalt curbs for our neighbor. They had extra material left, and asked if we needed anything. They said they couldn’t fill TAW’s hole without their permission. We made a call and after 30 minutes on hold, TAW refused to let them fill the hole.
- After a week or so, TAW finally sent someone out to fill the hole, but they didn’t bother to move the metal plate. Instead, they filled in the 10% of the hole that was exposed. Even that 10% was done badly.
- We removed the metal cover and continued to ask TAW to fix their mess.
- Over three weeks passed before they finally came by and finished the job.
Our driveway completely torn up to install one of the pipes
The hole after we manually covered it to spare our neighbors some pain
They came and ONLY filled the exposed part of the hole…
A view of the mediocre partial fill job
The half-filled hole
Terribly frustrating when seemingly simple things are made complex..!! That’s the world we live in. I remember our water and sewer line were run / connected at the same time our foundation was poured. Good luck and post some more pictures when you have time. Tom
Thanks! I have an onslaught of updates coming soon; I usually write a new post each time we finish something, but we’ve been working on a bunch of things in parallel.
The photo of John next the hole is great. It’s no fun for the both of you, but I imagine at some point all you can do is have a sense of humor about it all. You all have been doing great work, and we hope you are well.
Michael Gillespie
Yeah… this was definitely one of those times where all you could do was laugh. On the bright side, cars tend to use our road as an off-ramp for a highway and take it way too fast. The hole did a great job of slowing them down.