Contained removal, disposal, cleaning and drying after a drain, sewer line or septic system pushes water back into a cellar or bathroom.
Fastest: call (833) 490-5225. Or send this and we call you back.
A sewer or septic backup is water returning through a drain, toilet or floor outlet instead of leaving the building. It is treated as contaminated whatever it looks like, so porous materials are removed rather than dried, the area is sealed off and surfaces are cleaned. Phones are answered 24/7.
Stop adding water. That is the one useful thing a household can do in the first minutes: no flushing, no sinks, no shower, no washing machine, no dishwasher. Every gallon that goes down a drain while the line is blocked or the system is full has nowhere to go but back into the lowest opening in the building, which is usually a cellar floor drain or a ground-floor toilet.
Then keep people out. This category of water is handled differently from a burst pipe for one reason: what is in it. Gloves, boots and eye protection are the minimum, children and pets stay upstairs, and nothing that came into contact with it gets rinsed in a kitchen sink. A technician arrives set up for containment, not just extraction.
Whether the house is on village sewer or on a private septic system changes who you call about the cause, but it does not change the cleanup. In Templeton some homes are on village sewer and others rely on private septic systems and wells, and no public source maps which is which, so say which one you have when you call. On sewer the question is whether the blockage is on your side of the connection or the district's; on septic it is the tank, the baffle, the pump or the leaching field.
Treat all of it as contaminated: gloves, boots and eye protection, nothing rinsed in a kitchen sink, nothing washed in with household laundry, and children and pets kept out until the area has been cleaned and treated. Stop using every fixture in the house until the line is clear. Do not enter water that has reached outlets or the base of a boiler, do not use a household vacuum, and do not run a fan across contaminated water before it has been removed and cleaned.
All fixtures are taken out of use and the household is told to keep the area clear. The technician checks for electrical risk at floor level, then sets up the entry route so that nothing is tracked through the rest of the building. Air is kept moving out of the affected space rather than into the house.
Sheeting and taped doorways separate the wet area from the rest of the building before work begins, and foot traffic is restricted to one route. This is the step people are most tempted to skip and the one that most often prevents a second problem, because contaminated water that is walked into a dry hallway makes a bigger job than the one that started it.
Extraction units take the liquid, and solids and silt are removed and bagged for disposal. The floor drain or pit is cleared so it can take water again. If the blockage is still in the line you are told plainly, because cleaning a cellar that is about to take a second backup is wasted work and the drain side has to be cleared first.
Porous materials that touched the water go out: carpet and pad, cardboard, stored paper, chipboard, soft furnishings, mattresses, wet insulation and the bottom of any wallboard. Everything is photographed and listed before removal. Hard surfaces, metal, glass and solid timber are normally cleanable and are kept.
Floors, wall bases, plant and any fixture that was involved are cleaned and then treated. Only after that does drying start, with dehumidifiers and air movers running in the contained space and daily meter readings against a benchmark from a dry part of the building. Reinstating anything removed is quoted separately once the readings are dry.
Because the material in it cannot be cleaned out of a porous item. Carpet pad, cardboard, chipboard, insulation and fabric that have taken sewage are removed and disposed of rather than dried, the work area is sealed off, and surfaces are cleaned and treated before any drying equipment is switched on.
Order matters as much as method. Running air movers in a contaminated room before it is cleaned moves the problem around the building, which is the opposite of what the job is for. Containment first, removal second, cleaning third, drying last.
It also changes the salvage line. A solid timber bookcase that stood in clean water can be dried and kept; the same bookcase in a sewage backup usually keeps its shelves and loses its contents. The technician will go through the pile with you rather than deciding for you.
The cleanup is the same and the cause is not. On village sewer the question is whether the blockage is in your building sewer or beyond the connection, which decides who clears it. On a private septic system the tank, the baffle, the pump and the leaching field are all yours, and the local board of health oversees them.
A 1965 special act created the Baldwinville-Otter River Sewer District in Templeton, and the town wastewater plant on Reservoir Road discharges to the Otter River. No public source sets out which streets the district reaches, so the answer for your address comes from the town rather than from a web page.
If you are on septic, the practical first call after the cleanup is a septic contractor, and your board of health is the office to ask about requirements. Private well and septic system after a flood covers the aftermath in more detail, and flooded well and private system cleanup deals with a cellar that holds the pump and tank.
A single toilet overflow of clear water on a tiled bathroom floor, caught at once, is a bucket-and-disinfectant job for most households. Anything that reached carpet, a cellar floor, stored goods or a wall base, or that contains solids, is not, and the main risks are health and cross-contamination rather than the water itself.
If you do tackle a small one, wear gloves, boots and eye protection, bag what you remove, keep children and pets out, and do not rinse anything in a kitchen sink or put cloths in with the household wash. Do not use a household vacuum, and do not point a fan at it.
Stop and call if you find solids, if the water reached more than a small area of hard floor, if it has gone under a wall or a cabinet, or if anyone in the house has a condition that makes exposure a bad idea. Call (833) 490-5225 and say that it is a drain backup rather than a leak, so the crew arrives equipped for it.
A standard homeowner policy generally excludes water that backs up through sewers or drains unless a backup endorsement has been added, and the same is generally true of sump-pump failure and of flood. Your policy and your insurer decide, so the only reliable answer comes from reading yours or asking them.
It is worth checking before you need it, because the endorsement is a routine thing to add and the moment you want it is the moment you cannot. Ask your agent specifically about water backup and about sump overflow, which are not always the same item.
Keep the evidence either way. Photographs taken before anything moved, the itemised list of what was disposed of, the cleaning record and the drying log are what a claim is built on. If a claim is denied and you believe it was handled improperly, the Massachusetts Division of Insurance Consumer Service Unit takes complaints, although it cannot decide the cause of a loss.
Keep wipes, fats and food waste out of the drains, know where your cleanout is, have a septic tank pumped on the schedule a contractor recommends, and ask a plumber about a backwater valve if your cellar has taken water back more than once. Keep porous storage off a cellar floor.
Groundwater and storm water getting into a drainage system is a recognised cause of overloads, which is why how a sump discharge or a roof drain may be connected is a question for the town rather than an assumption. Ask before you connect anything, and never assume a cellar pump can discharge into a sewer line.
Keep a short record of each incident: the date, what was in use in the house at the time, the weather, and which fixture went first. A pattern that shows up only in heavy rain points somewhere quite different from one that shows up every time the washing machine drains, and that is the information a drain contractor needs.
Roots, grease, wipes or a collapsed section in the line between the house and the connection or the tank. The water returns to the lowest fixture in the building, so a cellar floor drain or a basement toilet goes first. Clearing the line is a drain contractor's or plumber's job; the cleanup is the restoration side.
A full or unpumped tank, a failed baffle, a dead effluent pump, or a leaching field that is saturated after heavy rain or snowmelt. The giveaway is often outside as well as in: soggy ground or standing water over the field. The fix is a septic contractor's, and your local board of health is the office that oversees septic systems.
Ground and storm water finding its way into drainage and overloading it, so the line surcharges and the lowest opening in the house takes the surplus. This is why it so often happens during the storm rather than after it, and why a cellar that has never backed up can do so in an unusual wet spell.
Templeton is made up of four villages, Templeton Center, East Templeton, Baldwinville and Otter River, in a town of roughly 8,100 people, and the drainage picture is mixed as a result. A 1965 special act created the Baldwinville-Otter River Sewer District, and the town wastewater plant on Reservoir Road discharges to the Otter River. Outside the district, homes rely on private septic systems, and in the surrounding hill towns that pattern is more common still. Nothing published measures the split, so this page states the pattern and not a share.
Backups in this area cluster around wet ground rather than cold. A saturated leaching field after spring melt, or during the kind of rain that follows a tropical system in September, cannot take normal household use, and that is when a house with no history of trouble gets water on a cellar floor. The same wet ground raises the water table against old cellar walls, so a septic problem and a seeping wall sometimes show up in the same week and get mistaken for one another.
One thing worth saying plainly: a municipal system's capacity problem is not the same thing as your drain backing up, and the two should not be run together. Nearby Fitchburg, a city of about 42,000 people, has roughly 14 miles of combined sewer and discharges to the Nashua River under a federal consent decree, which is a city-system matter for the city and its regulators. A backup in a Templeton cellar is almost always about the building sewer, the tank or the field at that address.
Tell us what's happening and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a quick fix, and what sewer and septic backup cleanup should cost.
Not sure if you're covered? Check your ZIP code.
Pump-out, clearing, cleaning and metered drying of flooded cellars, including stone and brick walls, dirt floors and mechanical plant.
Water removal and drying when a cellar flood reaches the well pump, pressure tank, treatment gear or the plumbing serving a septic system.
Pump-out and vacuum removal of standing water from cellars, first floors and finished rooms, with the wet area measured before drying starts.
Assessment, containment and removal of mold growth that has taken hold on materials wetted by a flood or hidden leak.
Stay off the stairs until you know the power to the cellar is off, then find where the water is coming from and stop it if you safely can.
Coverage is decided by your own policy and your insurer, never by this page.
A flood that reaches a well pump or a septic tank contaminates both the water and the system.
Treat it as one. Water arriving through a drain has been in the drainage system regardless of its colour, and the colour tells you more about how much of it there is than about what is in it. The handling is the same, which means removal, cleaning and treatment rather than drying in place.
If the line is still blocked, the drain side comes first, because cleaning a cellar that is about to take a second backup achieves nothing. You can call both and have them work in sequence. Tell whoever answers here that the line is still blocked, so the visit is scheduled around the clearance rather than before it.
Rarely the whole of either. Hard floors are cleanable. What usually goes is the porous material that was in contact with the water, which in a finished cellar means carpet, pad, insulation and the bottom few inches of wall board so the cavity behind can be cleaned and dried.
The removal and cleaning are normally the shorter part; the drying runs for several days on readings, as it does after any water loss. Nobody can give you a date on the phone, and the honest version is that the readings decide it. A crew is sent as soon as one is free and the stages are explained as they go.
Not necessarily, and it is worth separating them. Saturated ground can overload a leaching field and push water back indoors, and the same saturated ground can push water through an old cellar wall, with no connection between the two beyond the weather. A technician measures and looks at both rather than assuming one caused the other.
Septic systems come under your local board of health, so that is the office to ask about a failing system and about what it requires. For a sewer connection, the town is also where to ask about responsibility either side of the connection. This site is not the right source for either answer, and the town will tell you in one call.
No, and it is the main reason this category is not dried in place. The smell is in the porous material, so masking it leaves the source in the building and it returns as soon as the room warms up. Removal, cleaning and treatment are what deal with it permanently.