Damage to Sewer

Alex101010

Hi,
If anyone has any experience of this or and thoughts they would be most appreciated.

When installing some path edging in my garden i belive i have damaged a surface water sewer.  It does not service my house in any way but runs through my garden.

The position of it has really confused me as a small area of my garden is raised maybe 50cm and ive only put in 45cm stakes so of course did not expect a sewer to be that high.  The back end of my garden is hiwever now under 3 inches+ of water so ive defintely hit something.

Anyway i have the water board coming out but in advance of this im curious if anyone has experience of united utilities billing home owners for the works and if so how costly could this be.

I would say the back end of my garden is always sodden so im now suspecting the pipe has been leaking for some time but what ive done has made it 100x worse.

Also i was wondering would my insurance company pick up the bill?  Its not accidental damage to drains as the sewer does not serve my property but i therefore assume this would be public liability wouldnt it?

Thanks in advance.

Alex.

Davesnave

Are you sure it's a sewer? When we were bashing in fence posts, we first used a steel probe and hit something plastic at 0.6m. This turned out to be the village water main, so we wouldn't have been very popular if we'd tractor rammed it with a gatepost! Your CON29DW report if you purchased in modern times might show you what you've hit. It might even be accurate. Ours was up to 5m out!

Ectophile

Another possibility is that it's a land drain.  These are often buried into boggy ground to help the water to drain away.  By smashing it, you've made all the water drain into that bit of the garden.

JudgeDekker

What was the end of this story, Alex? Would be useful to know in case it every happened to anyone else (hope not!)

TadleyBaggie

Alex hasn’t logged on for over 2 years, suspect they aren’t coming back.