Blocked Drains Bellevue Hill

The camera goes down first on almost every call to this ridge, before a single tool comes out of the van.

That matters here more than most places, given what's under the ground. A 1910-1930 building boom left this ridge with grand Federation, Queen Anne and Spanish Mission houses on generous blocks, and later decades filled in apartment blocks further down the slope.

Homes from that boom were plumbed in earthenware, and a century underground eventually tells on those joints, letting roots and grit work their way in. Ginahgulla Road, near the Scots College grounds, is a good example of just how old that pipe now is.

Gravity does the rest. This ridge sits 92 metres up, and water sheds off it fast, so whatever grit and debris the slope picks up tends to settle in the drains and pits lower down rather than spreading out evenly.

Age on its own would be manageable. Age plus a steep fall is what turns a joint that might survive decades on level ground into one that fails within a handful of years.

CCTV drain inspection tells us precisely which section has gone before we dig anywhere near a driveway or a retaining wall, and blocked drain repair is what follows once that failed length is confirmed.

Cooper Park's 38 hectares of bushland sit right on the Bellevue Hill and Woollahra boundary, its creek and walking tracks bordered by the Moore steps on one side and the floodlit courts of the Cooper Park Tennis Centre on the other.

Leaf litter and grit off the tracks and creek bed build up through the dry weeks between one storm and the next, with no street gutter along that bushland edge to carry small amounts away as they fall.

The courts and paths shed their own share of rain too, off hard, sealed surfaces that drain toward the same gully the bushland empties into.

An ordinary shower barely shifts any of that build-up. A proper downpour is different, moving weeks of stored debris downhill in one go, through the gully and into the blocked stormwater network that carries it on under the ridge.

That's why the grates and pits nearest the reserve get checked first before the wet season sets in, rather than waiting to find out mid-storm which one gives way.

Many of the apartment blocks built lower on the slope since the 1990s stand on ground that carried one of the ridge's original Federation-era lots, so a shared stack can still tie into the same earthenware connection laid for the house that stood there first.

A ridge that sheds water fast doesn't help matters. Grit and root growth working loose further up the slope tends to settle right where a newer stack meets that older street-side join, lower down.

A camera run settles which side of that join is actually failing, the shared stack inside the building or the inherited connection beneath it, before the body corporate commits to a scope of work.

That answer is worth having before anyone commits to digging up a shared line on this slope.

1. Locate it on screen first. A camera run down the line shows exactly what's gone wrong before anything else happens.
2. Then it gets cleared. High-pressure jetting or the electric eel, picked to suit what's actually in the pipe.
3. A real failure gets rebuilt. Collapsed or cracked earthenware is relined properly, never just pushed through.
4. We finish by proving it. A second look with the camera, and the work is guaranteed for life.