Man, most of these are civil (made it about 2/3 through the posts).
Working a BS summer camp...wow. We had working toilets, hooked up to a septic, that was just outside. Same technology that kids were used to at home, just in a wooden shack that would stifle all air flow and increase the heat to like 120F on normally 100-105F days.
Working as the camp commissioner, I was charged with small maintainance and helping with bigger jobs. We would have kids from all walks of life (inner city scouts, LDS, normal troops, etc), even non-scouts for a while. LDS kids were the worst. Trains were run on the toilets. What is a train? Much like pr0n, but with poop (well, that is kinda the same as pr0n too, but with only one person this time). So much so, one time, to our best estimates, was 10-12 kids. Poop was OVER THE LID. That meant someone stood over the toilet to drop more in.
It took us (me and another guy) about 30 minutes to get it down. A shovel, some sticks and a plunger.
We would also have kids flush sticks, stones and other things down there. That would clog it, then proceed to poop afterwords. So you would fill it up and nothing would get it down, since the stone/sticks would prevent anything going down. Those were even more fun.
But we would ALWAYS have fun about the 4th week of camp, since the septics would finally fill up, the leach lines were clogged but we didn't know. And so none of the toilets would work at the site, until the septic drained. But usually this is when it started raining, so the soil gets saturated and no water is going into it from the septic. So for a few years, they get the bright idea of PUMPING the tanks first, before kids come. So they pump and tell us 3 tanks have roots. So we go inspect and try to remove the roots. Now these are the roots of the Cedar trees of the Austin area.
Tank #1 has about a 1" line going around the inside. Nothing too major, along with some smaller fingers going into the water. Tank #2 is a bit worse, but still only took about an hour or so. Clean off the dirt to the lid, open up with backhoe, remove roots, replace lid, pour 50lb of rock salt around lid to prevent roots, move on. Then we get to tank #3.
Tank #3, when we opened the viewport, looks clean. The other 2 you could see the roots. We shined the flashlight down and didn't really see anything. So we cleaned off the lid, broke one of the lifting lugs removing the lid and stared in amazement. The septic (which was at the site with ALL of the septic issues for the past 15 years, or however long the issues were) had roots. The only opening of the roots was the viewport. Perfectly round and 6" in diameter. From there, a direct angle down from the viewport so you couldn't see the roots. So now we see why in all these years we had issues.
So we try to cut the roots. No luck. We try grabbing with hands. No luck. I took our rock bar (6' bar of steel with a sharp end), picked it up and slammed it into the roots. Went about 4" in and stopped. After about 2 hours of working it over, I finally got on a throw away pair of clothes (and I do mean throw away), some thick rubber gloves, safety glasses and got enough of a handle on the roots mano-e-mano to get the backhoe in to grab it (didn't want to crack the septic tank). Finally pulling all of the roots out, another 20 minutes, it was about a 5' tall pile, 6-7' in diameter, solid. And smelt oh so wonderful. Since this was late May, wasn't too hot, yet. I think the largest root was about 3" in diameter, wrapped like a snake around the tank. I did burn those clothes, soak everything else in bleach and poured about 2 50lb sacks of salt on that tank to kill damn near everything around there.
Before we started removing the roots, I could walk across the tank without falling in. They were STOUT.
~egon