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My RV's Fountain of Poo
by Jim
(Fayetteville, NC)
Editor's Note: This story was submitted on the Everything About RVing Funny RVing Stories Page.
I took a job in another state where I would be staying for a year while it was completed. My father offered me his camper to use for this time so I would be able to carry my Macaw parrot with me while there.
The company I work for paid for a temp tank that a portable john company came by each week to dump for me. They instructed me to leave the valves closed like you would when camping, and just open them before they came to dump the main tank outside. This worked wonderfully.
After about 4 months of staying there, I decided to flush out the black water tank. This seemed like a good idea, as my wife and I were basically living there and the camper was never moved to loosen the contents of the tank, and even with the blue chemical in the tank, there was a smell starting to come around from time to time.
I found the water hose hookup for flushing it out and connected the hose to it. At this time the tank was only half full by the lights that tell you their status. These lights had always seemed to work and I had no reason not to trust them now.
I told my wife to stand at the light monitor and let me know when the last light came on so I could stop the water. She watched with great attention as I filled the black water tank with flush water on top of the existing dirty water that was in there. "Three lights on" she shouted after about two minutes. Then there was this noise that I can only describe as similar to a plastic bottle expanding in the sun.
I asked her again how many lights were on, and she replied again that there were 3 only. Then she heard this noise and opened the door to the bathroom at the perfect time to watch the toilet valve reach its limit of pressure and a geiser that was 4" in diameter come bursting out and hitting the ceiling. She shouted at me to close the water, but I already knew what happened from the screaming she let out first.
When I walked around the camper
My wife is in the yard very unhappy and dry heaving, my macaw is dancing on his perch looking for some escape, and I am standing there helpless as I watched this river go from one end of the camper to the other, and reaching a depth of at least an inch before flowing out of the door.
Reality sets in as I try to make my way inside to help my parrot and see the damage. This is when I see small pieces of toilet paper hanging from every cabinet handle, all the walls, and the towel racks in the bathroom. I see this nasty goo flowing into a heater duct beside the toilet, inside the cabinets in the bathroom, and all the cabinets and the beds in the living area as well.
There were places this stuff reached that I didn't know they existed. For the next 4 hours, I dumped a shop vac many times trying to get this flood under control and cleaned. As you clean the main floor, it keeps running out from the cabinets and every place you can think of.
That night was spent with the vacuum, towels, and mops. We opened the windows and doors the whole time, but the smell was overwhelming. The carpet in the bedroom was even soaked. In the end, every piece of carpet had to be replaced, everything in the storage compartments removed and washed, the compartments scrubbed with bleach, and all the walls washed at least 3 times.
A week later, the smell was starting to get weaker and I think we were winning the battle. This was a very expensive and time-consuming mistake that I will never make again! For advice to everyone, never trust those little monitor lights and always flush with the dump valve open!
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