Blocked Drains Kiama

A large part of this municipality was on septic within living memory, and it still shows underground. The $50 million Gerringong Gerroa Sewerage Scheme was approved in January 2001 and broke ground that August, laying around fifty kilometres of pipe to a plant near the Crooked River at Gerroa, sized for over eleven thousand people and recycling more than 80 per cent of its treated water to local farms rather than to an ocean outfall. Kiama Council's septic pump-out service stopped once it was running. So any house in Gerringong or Gerroa built before roughly 2002 was originally plumbed to an on-site system and was later converted.

Conversion did not mean removal. In practice, the old tank was decommissioned in place and the old absorption trenches and drainage lines were simply abandoned. We find them constantly, usually when someone is landscaping, excavating for a pool, building an extension, or trying to work out where a permanently soggy patch of lawn is coming from. It matters for drain work because a camera survey in one of these properties can turn up two generations of pipework running in different directions, and because digging blind near an old absorption field is a bad idea. We locate before we dig.

The authority boundary runs through our service area, and it changes the rules. Sydney Water services the Municipality of Kiama, with local wastewater going to the Bombo water resource recovery facility, a secondary treatment plant discharging through the Bombo Point ocean outfall. Gerroa is Sydney Water's southern limit. Cross the boundary to Berry and you are in Shoalhaven Water territory, a different authority with its own requirements, including for backflow prevention. If you own property either side of that line, or you are a strata manager with buildings in both, they are not interchangeable and the paperwork differs.

Stormwater and sewer get tangled here more than people expect. The Kiama Gerringong to Jamberoo corridor has a documented stormwater problem: in the August 2020 storm, 86.8 millimetres fell on ground already soaked by 220 millimetres over the previous fortnight, a drainage pit and catchment hollow on the far side of Bridges Road at Gerringong gave way, and water ran through the Chittick Lodge grounds into properties on Henry Lee Drive and Fern Street, with one home taking about 700 millimetres through it. Kiama Council's Gerringong to Jamberoo Flood Study looked specifically at mitigation for that area. On the property side, that kind of event is what pushes water into inspection openings and gullies that would otherwise be fine.

Rural fringe properties are their own category. Kiama Council records roughly 920 unsewered sites across the LGA in what it describes as fringing rural areas, though it does not publish which pockets they are, so we will not guess at your address. What we can say is that if you are on an on-site system, a blocked drain is a different problem entirely: it may be a failed absorption trench, a full or damaged tank, a pump fault, or tree roots in the transfer line, and none of those is solved by jetting the house drain. We diagnose which system you actually have before quoting.

The rest is the ordinary work, done properly. Roots in old clay joints get cut and jetted, and we tell you honestly whether cutting will just become an annual appointment. Grease and scale gets jetted. A collapsed or dropped section needs a liner or excavation and there is no clever way around it. Coastal properties at Kiama, Kiama Downs, Minnamurra and Gerroa also get sand and salt working into external drainage that inland properties never deal with, which is worth checking on any grated drain or pit near the beach.