Sewer Line Repair in Rockville Centre, NYYour Lateral to the Village Sewer

The village maintains the sewer in the street; the lateral from your foundation to it is yours. With 44% of the village's homes built before 1940, by the Census Bureau's latest survey, many laterals are clay pipe or cast iron that has been in the ground for 85 years or more. What tends to fail:

• Clay joints that let roots in, so the line clogs every year or two.
• Cracked or broken sections, often under a driveway or near a large tree.
• Cast iron that has corroded through along the bottom of the pipe.
• Old connections to the street that have settled out of line.

We clear the line first and look at what comes back. Repeated roots, pieces of clay or a clog that keeps returning at the same spot mean we need to dig and repair that section, or replace the run if it's failing in several places.

Our overlay of FEMA's flood map puts about 3% of the village in the high-risk flood zone, and Patch reported the Mill River flooding at least 16 homes on Riverside Drive in Sandy. For houses in that low ground, a backwater (sewer check) valve on the house sewer can close if the street sewer backs up, keeping sewage from coming in through a basement floor drain. It needs a cleanout for access and an occasional check. For most of the village, which sits outside the flood zone, the work is about old pipe, not backflow.