Update: Sam's Italian food has bought off the city -- Gagne now blames a sewer collapse.

Mop heads, grease, rags and dough. What a recipe for a giant pile of glue.
Yes, everyone- watch out for clowns.

Nice report, daphne. I followed the link that Dave gave where there were posted some photos of the on-going repair work. What I can't fathom is how this is costing only 51K. Even if these workers aren't unionized and the local economy has tanked, that seems just impossible. DDaddy. Is this possible?

Boy, I hope my upcoming colonoscopy doesn't look like that.

Having that Pennywise image in my head before I even saw the picture accompanying the story, I could have sworn that was a misshapen skull blocking the pipe. I'm still not entirely convinced that it is not. And now I'm gonna have nightmares for a week...thanks alot, Shitler.

Damn, Bilge I didn't notice that. Now I'll be up all night too. When they unearth this monster, they should make a large calzone out of if and force Sam's owners to eat it.

Harumph. This is interesting. I found the Lewiston city ordinances bullshit

city ordinances

and rags are mentioned. I didn't read all the gobbledeegook, but it's in there.

Here's what I don't like about how they've resolved this. If it was a cave-in of the sewer system, fine and good. All is well. BUT it's NOT. Rags and mop heads, and especially grease are not sewer items. This shows that the restaurant is tossing things aside to the sewer plant down the road that are a pain to get out, and should be put in the dump.

That should have been in the article. I wonder if it will be mentioned.

_______
.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Daphne, that was the nail I was trying to hit on the head. WTF are these things doing in a sewer? Grease is supposed to be recycled, but it costs to have it picked up. Those other items are just bizzare. They should have been in a dumpster (if he even has one as required). I hope this guy gets in deep caca. It sounds as if he was trying to save money at taxpayers expense.

Yeah yeah yeah...what about that HUGE FUCKING SKULL????

I want my mommy.

You think you got a scare? When I first saw it, I thought it was Strom Thurmond come back to life, looking more vigorous than he had in years.

YOU'RE RIGHT!!!! Great, thanks, LJ, now I have a month, at least, of nightmares.

LJ, I know that here you can rent a big backhoe for less than a $1500 a day plus delivery, so excavating this to find the problem and such for $51,000 for a small section seems reasonable. The real cost will be in fixing ALL the breaks that are in this section, once you start digging you always find more and from the sounds of it they did just that.

The real question is which building has a drain large enough to accommodate a mop head. I've never been in the back of restaurants but I can't imagine they have drains that large, I would have guessed maybe 3-4" for hosing down the floor. Find the big drain and find the perp. So ends this lesson of sewer sleuth.

Bunga, screw the mopheads....tell me, smart guy, how a dead U.S. Senator from the deep south cam back to life and got wedged in a sewer in Lewiston Maine?? Huh? C'mon, wise guy! Sleuth that, why don't ya?

I think we need someone on the scene. Dave does Poop Report have a field office in Maine?

Not to imply that Bunga needs any help solving this conundrum, but perhaps this is a new phase of the Southern strategy, foreseen by Kevin Phillips. The first step was to scare southern whites into voting Republican. Phase 2 was to relocate a resurrected Strom to the Maine sewers and scare northern whites into moving south.

I think maybe we need someone like Greg Palast on the scene looking into this Logjam, looks like I'm in way over my head.

P.S. I heard they never really buried Jerry Falwell either, my guess he's turning up in either Michigan or Washington State.

For some reason (oh, I don't know, but maybe because there's NO NEW STORY TODAY, goddamn it!) I just reread this article. For the first time it registered that the pipe in this photo is only a foot in diameter. I'd been perceiving it as something more like 10 feet. Why is that? Have others been seeing it that big, or have I entered the Twilight Zone?

DEE DEE DEE DEE, DEE DEE DEE DEE
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight, sound and smell but of mire. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a turd up ahead— your next stop, the Poopreport Zone!

You're not the only one. It must be an optical illusion. I was thrown off to the size because it kind of reminded me of that giant ball rolling after Indiana Jones.

thats still a big fucking skull.

Great, I'll have to spend another night with my head under the covers saying "there is no skull in the pipes, there is no skull in the pipes".

Whoever flushed mop heads down the toilet needs to be sent down there and forced to eat through the clog.

Quoteth the Logjam...
"Not to imply that Bunga needs any help solving this conundrum, but perhaps this is a new phase of the Southern strategy, foreseen by Kevin Phillips. The first step was to scare southern whites into voting Republican. Phase 2 was to relocate a resurrected Strom to the Maine sewers and scare northern whites into moving south."

Political humor or not, this is just funny. Very nice.

Here's Stroms's skull

According to generalized anatomical proportions, the head should be one eighth of the body. This skull appears as it might be a bit bigger than the 12 inches suggested, as you'd have to take into account the mandible (lower jaw) and flesh that would have surrounded it in life. So, if his skull was 14 inches or so, Strom Thurman was roughly nine and a half feet tall with his shit-stomping shoes on. That's one tall politician.

I think it was a set-up from radical liberals. If you take a look at this site, you see a hint as to whom was to blame. Towards the end of the page, there is a picture of ole' Strom's melon that morphs into a skull. Coincidence? I think not.

_______
.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Isn't there some kind of baceteria that will eat yeast? Of course that would still leave the mop heads, and oh yea, the giant freakin skull!

CF, I think what you are looking for is mopheadaromyces cerevaie. It would work, but the skull would still need to be flushed out.

When I first saw the picture, I thought of the giant wooden ball that I believe the City of Boston (I don't remember for certain as it may have been another city that I'm thinking of), as I'd seen it on a documentary on tv a couple years ago) uses when needed, to clean out their sewer mains every so often, as the ball is something like 90% of the diameter of the mains. I figured that is what is needed to get rid of the plug, and then I read the article to find out the pipe in question is only 12 inches in size. My question is this: Why can't they just get one of the guys from the local Roto-Rooter businesses and have them unclog the line? Or is this too big for Roto-Rooter?

It sounds from the newspaper article that attempts were made by the city with both snake and water jet. I'm not sure Roto-Rooter has anything stronger in their arsenal. I think the ball you are talking about can only be used for partial clogs and routine maintainence. If thats a skull down there then it must have quite a set of dreadlocks.

Its a little known fact that in his last years, Strom Thurmond became a Rastafarian, spending his waning days listening to Jimmy Cliff and bogarting huge spliffs. Some of his more eloquent congressional rants were the result of a combination of Jamaica's finest, Captain Morgan, and Red Stripe.

I think the mystery clog has been solved. It's Strom Thurmond's skull sporting huge mop-like
dreadlocks. Should we notify the Lewiston public works department?

either that, or reincarnate Haile Selassie, and see if he can't coax ol' Strom out of the pipe.

WHAT! Have two skulls down there? You really don't want me to sleep again, do you?

Question: "...tell me, smart guy, how a dead U.S. Senator from the deep south cam back to life and got wedged in a sewer in Lewiston Maine?"

Answer: Karma.
_______
Yo quiero Taco Bell.

daphne. Nice job on adding the lost detail to the skull, and even more on finding the web site with the simulation of the transformation of dead face to live skull. To tell you the truth, I thought I was just being fanciful in speculating that this was Strom, but apparently I had tapped into something cosmic. As to your calculations of his height based on the skull's dimensions, depending on the camera angle, the skull could be considerably smaller than the 12-inch diameter pipe. In any case, your sleuthing now has me as scared as Bilge.