Every wet spring and every tropical remnant that stalls over the Piedmont brings the same call to this number: the toilets gurgle, the shower drains slowly, and by the third day of rain there is a wet stripe in the back yard. Nothing is broken yet. The system is telling you that the ground it drains into is full.
Gaston County's clay is the reason. A drain field works by letting effluent soak into soil that has air in it. When a week of rain fills that soil, there is nowhere for the water to go, and the field backs up toward the tank and the house. On sandy ground east of Charlotte the water table drops in a day; here it takes longer, and a household that keeps running the washer through it is the one that ends up with sewage in the tub.
What to do while it rains
- Cut water use hard: no laundry, no dishwasher, short showers, fewer flushes.
- Keep vehicles and anything heavy off the field so the wet soil is not compacted.
- Divert downspouts and sump pump discharge away from the field if they run toward it; this is the single most common cause of a field that floods every storm.
- Do not add anything to the tank. Additives do not dry out a field.
When it is a pumping and when it is a repair
If the drains recover within a couple of days of the rain stopping, the field is alive and overloaded, and the fix is pumping the tank so it has the most possible reserve next time, plus fixing whatever surface water is running onto the field. If the symptoms stay after a dry week, or if the wet stripe is there in August, the field has sealed or a line is broken, and that is a diagnosis visit and probably a county repair permit.
A tank that is pumped on schedule gives a field a fighting chance in a wet year, because it is not also pushing solids into trenches that are already underwater. That is the cheapest insurance a Gaston County homeowner on clay can buy.
Useful links
- Gaston County Environmental Health, On-Site Wastewater and Wells – repair permits when the field has failed
Questions on this
Will the field dry out on its own?
If it was only saturated, yes, within days of the rain ending and with the tank pumped. If it does not, it has failed.