Village life: Attack of the frozen feces

Published on December 31st, 2009

By ALEX DEMARBAN

For years, Tim DeBilt has owned one of Quinhagak's nicer toilets.

His home ties into the flush-haul system that serves a portion of the Western Alaska village of 660.

It works like this: He flushes the toilet and the contents disappear to a tank outside his house. At regular intervals, the tribal government sends out workers who pump the waste into another tank and haul it all away with a four-wheeler.

The flushing toilet is so nice DeBilt likes to lord it over neighbors.

"He'll flush the toilet just to remind us what it sounds like," said Jim Barthelman, a fellow teacher.

Like Barthelman, most Quinhagak residents still use nose-wrinkling honeybuckets that are manually dumped into metal collection bins around town.

So maybe DeBilt had it coming to him when the tribal government stopped hauling waste for a month starting in late November.

Workers said the pump motor broke, so they ordered another one from Canada.

Then the temperature dropped well below zero.

And DeBilt's sinks, showers and toilets wouldn't drain.

Turns out the waste in the tank outside DeBilt's house froze. Unlike others on the flush-haul system, his house didn't come with pipe-warming heat tape.

That was never a problem. Until now.

So DeBilt, who just started his Christmas break, took matters into his own hands.

He grabbed an ice pick, opened the tank and started chipping.

He wanted to break through the dam.

Boy, did he.

Pressure had built in the tank, and when DeBilt broke the ice, a fountain of gunk shot into the air. DeBilt and his house got slathered.

"It was probably like Old Faithful," he said.

Barthelman didn't witness the blast, but saw the aftermath.

"This geyser shot 16 feet up the house, I'm not kidding," said Barthelman.

And the smell? "Oh, it was terrible."

DeBilt was mad. No surprise there.

But he managed to laugh, said Barthelman, who wrote about the explosion and posted pictures of DeBilt at work on www.jsbarthelman.blogspot.com [http://jsbarthelman.blogspot.com].

Still, the pipes didn't drain.

So DeBilt scooped away some 70 gallons of muck. He dumped it bucket by bucket into the "honeybucket hoppers," like he'd done for years before moving into the house with the nice toilet.

Still, it wouldn't flush.

So DeBilt fastened a chicken-wire platform over the waste to support two space heaters. Then he cranked up the heat and closed the tank.

Two days later, after adding plenty of boiling water, DeBilt's family had a flushing toilet.

Then the funniest thing happened, said Barthelman.

Shortly after DeBilt unclogged the pipes, the sewage hauler arrived on the ATV to empty the tank.

The pump motor still hadn't arrived, but it wasn't needed, the worker told DeBilt.

"Apparently, there wasn't much wrong with the machine," DeBilt said. "He said he worked on it himself and was able to get it going."

DeBilt was happy the drains worked by Christmas, but he's enduring good-natured ribbing from friends.

"They have their own names for me, which probably can't be printed in the newspaper," he said.

The village's flush-haul system, and the honeybuckets, should disappear in a few years.

A multi-million-dollar federal project recently brought running water and sewer to a section of the village, like people in Anchorage enjoy. By 2013, every house should be hooked up.