35 years after the municipality thought it had connected the last house to the Amsterdam sewer system, it turns out that there is still a building that discharges the waste water into the canal. This was resolved this week, but the residents were not really bothered by it. “It’s not like the moving boxes of shit were piled up in the hallway here.”
This week the house of Jan Middelkamp and Timon Fokkens on the Warmoesstraat will be connected to the sewer. And it was certainly no easy task to get that done, they say. It took six years, thousands of euros, endless VvE meetings and just as many telephone calls with the municipality and with sewer manager Waternet.
The authorities are initially convinced that the building in the Warmoesstraat is connected to the sewerage system. “From about 1975, the entire city center has been provided with sewerage,” says Thomas Staverman of Waternet. “We assumed that we had connected the last building to the sewer in 1987.”
cleavage
And in fact it was. That changes when a building in the Warmoesstraat is split in the early 1990s. The restaurant on the ground floor is connected to the sewer. But not the parent apartments. They discharge their waste water at the back of the building, into the water of the Damrak. “The five apartments were probably connected to old pipes during the renovation, which still discharged into the Damrak”, Middelkamp suspects. Waternet says it was never informed of the split.
The mistake was discovered by accident when Middelkamp and Fokkens moved from their houseboat on the Amstel to the top apartment of the building in 2016. After painting, Middelkamp rinses the brushes and his husband sees how the water of the Damrak suddenly turns white.
corks
Well-informed plumbers put them to the test and flush corks through all the toilets. A little later they all float on the canal water. The municipality and Waternet have already been informed of the situation by then.
It will ultimately take six years before Waternet will extend the sewer system to the front door of the complex in May 2022. “Waternet takes care of the sewerage up to the threshold or up to the front garden,” explains Staverman. “Behind that, it’s the owners responsibility”
In total, the entire operation will cost 8,000 euros, of which 5,000 will be charged to the residents. All in all a long and expensive joke, but Middelkamp can’t afford it. “It just takes some time with these kinds of things. And when you buy an old house, you know that there can be strange surprises. It’s part of it.”
In addition, the residents have never suffered from the wrong connection. “It’s not as if the moving boxes with poo were piled up here in the hallway. Whether it goes into the canal on the left, or into the sewer on the right, you don’t notice that. Gone is gone.”
Waternet hopes that this will really be the last building to receive a sewer connection. But Staverman does not dare to rule out that it will happen again. “We are here in a medieval city, where all kinds of buildings have been put together over the centuries. You can always miss one, as happened here.”