Salt Lake County, Utah
Drain Cleaning Salt Lake City: The City Cleans a Third of Its Sewers Every Year
Most cities keep their sewer maintenance schedule to themselves. Salt Lake City publishes it. The Department of Public Utilities’ Sewer System Management Plan states that cleaning goals call for 35 percent of the system to be cleaned annually, that the maintenance software generates the work orders monthly, and that those orders allow for system cleaning on a 2 – 4 year cycle, in so many words. More than 650 miles of pipe, nineteen crew members, and a lap the public can read.
This page is built on that document and its neighbours: the arithmetic of the cleaning programme, the two-class overflow taxonomy that quietly draws the property line, a lift station count that disagrees with itself inside one plan, and a bypass pipe running past the department’s own front door.
The half the city does not clean is yours. When the slow drain or the repeat blockage is on the private side of that line, that is what drain cleaning salt lake city households actually book. Request service, or read what the operator of the other half publishes first.
650 Miles, Nineteen Crew Members and a 35 Percent Goal
The system description in the plan counts approximately 653 miles of sanitary sewer, 13,200 manholes, 49,800-plus service connections and its lift stations. The Collections Maintenance group that keeps it flowing is described just as precisely: more than 650 miles of sewer lines and nineteen multi-functional crew members assigned to daily functions that include cleaning, rodding, CCTV, manhole maintenance and inspection. Point repairs are made by these same crews as the need arises; if a much larger problem is detected, the plan says, the information is turned over to the Engineering Division. One employee is always on call, 24 hours a day.
Then comes the sentence most utilities never print. Current cleaning goals call for 35 percent of the system to be cleaned annually. Scheduled maintenance work orders are generated automatically every month by the department’s maintenance management system, and those orders allow for system cleaning on a 2 – 4 year cycle. The camera programme runs the same way: CCTV inspection goals call for 10 percent of the system inspected annually, worked from the far end of the system toward the opposite end.
Where the cameras find trouble spots, the schedule accelerates. Identified trouble areas where grease, silt deposition and roots are common are placed on a rodding route, where cleaning frequencies are increased. Note what rodding means here. On our Chicago drain page, rodding is the evidence a resident cites to get a free city repair; in Salt Lake City it is a schedule the city runs on itself, unprompted. Same word, different instrument.
What the schedule means for a household is orientation, not comfort. The city cleans mains, on a published cycle. Everything between your fixtures and that main is outside the 35 percent, and no work order is ever generated for it. The tools and methods used on the private side are covered once, on our national drain cleaning page, and not restated here.
The Instrument
The Audit Form Calls 10 Percent Good. The Goal Is 35.
Bound into the back of the management plan is a 2016 Wastewater Collection System Audit form, filled in for the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities, with the grading key printed on its face: 0.0 is Not Demonstrated, 1.0 is Poor, 2.0 is Good and 3.0 is Best. One line grades the cleaning pace directly, and it names its own bar: Percent of system cleaned per year, 10 percent or greater equals Good. The department took a 3.0 on that line.
Set the two numbers side by side. The scale used to audit this utility treats one tenth of the system per year as good practice. The department’s own published goal is 35 percent, three and a half times the bar its auditors call Good. The same form prints the performance the pace buys: two sanitary sewer overflows in fiscal year 2015-16, or 0.31 per hundred miles of sewer, down from eight in each of the two years before.
We print this as attribution, not applause. A goal is a goal, the audit is dated, and no figure on this page should be read as a promise about next year. But it is rare to catch a utility, its auditor and the auditor’s own grading scale in one bound document, and rarer still for the utility to be lapping the scale. Whether those overflows reach the public record at all is the next section’s question, and the answer has more edges than the arithmetic.
The Property Line, Codified
Two Classes of Overflow, and the Sentence Both Begin With
The plan carries the Utah Sewer Management Program’s overflow taxonomy, and it is worth quoting at its own precision. A Class 1, or Significant, SSO is a spill or backup that affects more than five private structures; or affects one or more public, commercial or industrial structures; or may result in a public health risk to the general public; or exceeds 5,000 gallons, excluding those in single private structures; or discharges to Waters of the State of Utah. A Class 2 is anything that misses every one of those tests.
Now read the clause both definitions begin with: a backup that is not caused by a private lateral obstruction or problem. The classification itself draws the property line. Sewage standing in your basement because the city main surcharged is, officially, a non-significant event if it stops at your house and stays under the volume bar. The same sewage caused by your own lateral is not an SSO at all. It is simply your plumbing.
The clocks differ with the class. A Class 1 must be reported orally within 24 hours and in writing to the Division of Water Quality within five days. A Class 2 is reported once a year, in the annual programme report. Where those documents end up varies by city: Lexington SC publishes its overflow reports by default, while Orlando keeps records and produces them on request. Salt Lake City’s published instrument is the definition itself, and we spend it as written.
Printed, Not Resolved
Thirty-Nine Stations in One Section, Thirty-Five in Another
Our Salt Lake City emergency page caught this department quoting different figures across two publications. The sewer plan does it inside one document. The system description counts 39 wastewater lift stations in its inventory sentence. The plan’s own lift station section, some pages later, states there are thirty-five wastewater lift stations currently included in the collection system, ten of them serving residential areas. Same plan, same author line, four stations apart.
We print both figures and resolve nothing. Plans are living documents, sections are updated on different days, and the gap tells you more about how documents age than about pumps. It is also exactly why this series quotes utilities verbatim rather than paraphrasing them into false tidiness.
What the lift station section says operationally fits in one clause: stations run two or more pumps, six have on-site secondary power that transfers automatically in under a minute, and the rest can be powered in an emergency by one of 18 mobile generators stationed around the city and maintained under an outside contract. What a lift station means for the houses around it, and whose job each part is, is a subject this series covers once, on our Pompano Beach page, and we leave it there.
The Plan Admits It Has No Answer for Private Laterals
By ordinance, the plan states, laterals are owned and maintained by individual property owners, and the collection system is defined to exclude them. That much is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the candour that follows. Discussing the groundwater and stormwater that leak into sewers through defects, the plan concedes that reducing infiltration through private property issues is fraught with potential liability and other legal concerns, and that while some success has been encountered with individual residences, an acceptable approach to private systems has not yet been fully formulated.
Read that as a homeowner. The city’s engineers know that a share of the water in their pipes arrives through defects on the private side, and they state in their own management plan that they have not yet worked out an acceptable way to reach it. There is no inspection programme coming for your lateral, no cost-share on its repair and no crew with a work order. The pipe is yours in law, and in the plan’s own words the city has no formulated plan to change that.
The one place the city currently touches private laterals is a construction sidebar: the South Temple upsizing project installs sewer lateral cleanouts on some private properties and reconnects those laterals to the new main as the work passes. A cleanout fitted at the city’s expense during a capital project is a quiet gift; on any other day, access points on your line are your own project. What a cleanout buys you when a line blocks is covered on the national drain cleaning page, and when the blockage turns out to be structural, on sewer line repair.
Operations, Above Ground
A Bypass Pipe Past the Department’s Own Front Door
The West Temple sewer project is rehabilitating the aging line from 1300 South to Utopia Avenue, and its published operations read like a diary of what sewer work does to a street. An above-ground temporary bypass pipe runs along West Temple and nearby streets. Generators run through the night to keep sewer flows pumping. Residents get 24 hours’ notice before brief service interruptions. Left turns are restricted wherever the bypass pipe is not buried, garbage pickup and mail carry on, and each segment is planned at roughly five weeks.
Here is the geography the project page does not point out. Phase 1 runs from 1300 South to 1700 South. The department’s published business address is 1530 S. West Temple. The bypass pipe, the generators and the left-turn bans run directly past the front door of the utility that ordered them. We print that as geography, not as comment; there is something clarifying about a department that eats its own cooking.
The other projects each add one published fact worth carrying. The 1800 North realignment publishes its pages in English and Spanish, and its current phase includes a formal Notice to Vacate the City Right-of-Way: fencing, vehicles and personal belongings on Chicago Street and Duluth Avenue must clear the corridor before the trunk line comes through. How the West Temple contractor relines pipe without trenches is a method question, and methods belong to sewer line repair, not here.
Graywater in Salt Lake City: A Page Whose Answer Is No
Several cities in this series run graywater programmes; El Dorado Hills and Boulder own that subject here. Salt Lake City publishes the inverse: a page that exists to say no, with its reasons. Graywater, as the department defines it, is wastewater from bathtubs, showers, bathroom washbasins, clothes washers and laundry tubs, and not from toilets, kitchen sinks, dishwashers, water softeners or garage floor drains.
Under Utah Administrative Code R317-401-1, graywater use falls to local health departments, and the Salt Lake County Health Department has not adopted the Graywater Rule, nor, the page says plainly, is it currently looking to opt in. The published reasons: concern about cross-connections between potable and non-potable systems, and a county profile of high density, smaller lots and multi-dwelling complexes. State law adds the ceiling, with Utah Code Title 19 limiting the use of secondary water indoors.
So a laundry-to-landscape rig that is a permit form in one state is simply not available here, and a plumber who offers to pipe one anyway is offering you a cross-connection problem. Every drop from every fixture in a Salt Lake City house has exactly one lawful destination, the sanitary sewer, which is one more reason the pipes that carry it deserve attention before they complain.
The footprint that sewer serves is its own number. The department collects and treats wastewater for approximately 200,000 residents and customers, against a drinking water footprint of roughly 360,000 across several cities. Nearly half the people drinking this department’s water are sending their drains somewhere else entirely.
Salt Lake City Drain Questions, Answered Straight
The published cleaning cycle, the two overflow classes, the lift station count that disagrees with itself, and the lateral the city admits it cannot reach.
On a published schedule: cleaning goals call for 35 percent of the system annually, with work orders generated monthly by the maintenance system, allowing, in the plan’s own words, system cleaning on a 2 – 4 year cycle. Camera inspection runs at a 10 percent annual goal, worked from the far end of the system toward the opposite end.
You do, by ordinance. The plan states laterals are owned and maintained by individual property owners, and the collection system definition excludes them. The city cleans and cameras its mains on the published cycle; no work order is ever generated for the pipe between your house and the main.
An accelerated cleaning schedule. Where cameras find trouble areas in which grease, silt deposition and roots are common, those segments are placed on a rodding route with increased cleaning frequency. It is the city maintaining its own pipe; it does not reach private laterals, and what roots actually do inside a pipe is a subject another page in this series owns.
A Class 1 SSO: a backup not caused by a private lateral problem that affects more than five private structures, or any public, commercial or industrial structure, or may create a public health risk, or exceeds 5,000 gallons excluding single private structures, or reaches Waters of the State. Everything else is Class 2, non-significant, including a backup confined to one home.
For a Class 1, the state: an oral report within 24 hours and a written report to the Division of Water Quality within five days. Class 2 events are reported annually in the programme report. Cities differ on what the public then sees; this series records one city that publishes its reports by default and one that produces records on request.
Only if the cause is on the city side, and even then a backup confined to your single home, under the volume bar, is officially a Class 2, non-significant. If your own lateral caused it, it is not an SSO at all. Either way the first practical move is the same: report a sewage backup to the 24-hour dispatch line, which our Salt Lake City emergency page maps in full, and keep your own notes.
The plan gives two answers: 39 in its system description and thirty-five in its lift station section, ten serving residential areas. We print both rather than pick. The section also notes six stations carry automatic secondary power and the rest can be run from 18 mobile generators stationed around the city.
As published: local traffic only with one-way stretches, an above-ground bypass pipe along West Temple and nearby streets, generators running overnight, left turns restricted where the pipe is not buried, and brief sewer service interruptions with 24 hours’ advance notice. Garbage and mail continue. Each segment is planned at roughly five weeks.
No. Graywater use in Utah falls to local health departments, and Salt Lake County’s has not adopted the state Graywater Rule and is not currently looking to, citing cross-connection risk and the county’s density. State law separately limits secondary water indoors. Cities where the answer is yes are covered elsewhere in this series.
Almost never, and the plan is candid about why: reducing infiltration through private property is described as fraught with potential liability, and an acceptable approach to private systems has not yet been fully formulated. The one current exception is construction incidental: the South Temple upsizing installs lateral cleanouts on some properties as the new main goes in.
Deliberate structure. Methods live once in this series: jetting mechanics on the national hydro jetting page, tooling and diagnostics on drain cleaning, and the DIY end in our guide to clearing a drain without chemicals. This page carries only what is true in Salt Lake City: the schedule, the classes, the counts and the property line they draw.
Drain Cleaning on the Private Side of the Line
The city cleans its 650 miles on a published cycle. The pipe from your fixtures to the main is the half no work order covers, and it is the half we work: slow drains, repeat blockages, and the access points that make both cheaper, across Salt Lake City and the valley. On a page about a department that publishes its goals and reports its failures on a clock, we will not print a response promise we cannot keep. Tell us the fixture, the frequency and what has already been tried, and we take it from there.
How this page was built
Built on the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities Sewer System Management Plan, the 250-page PDF linked from the department’s utilities and services page at slc.gov: the system description and Collections Maintenance body (miles, manholes, connections, crew, the 35 percent goal, the cleaning cycle, rodding routes, far-end-first CCTV, point repairs, the Engineering handoff), the USMP overflow definitions and reporting clocks, the lift station section, the infiltration discussion, and the 2016 audit worksheet bound into the plan.
Project details are from the West Temple, South Temple and 1800 North project pages; the graywater section from the department’s graywater page; the wastewater footprint from the services page. The plan’s text layer is garbled in places; the cleaning-cycle sentence quoted here was recovered whole and is printed as published.
Deliberately not covered because other pages own them. Fats, oils and grease, including the department’s pretreatment F.O.G. page, what-not-to-flush lists and the pharmaceutical sewer ban are refused entirely on this page. Roots as a mechanism, and the plan’s root-cutting appendix, belong to our Phoenix drain page. Cast iron behaviour, the camera-after-a-second-clearance rule and jetting-restoring-the-bore are spent on the Salt Lake City plumber page.
Jetting mechanics live on hydro jetting, camera technique and tooling on national drain cleaning, trenchless methods on sewer line repair, backflow on our Phoenix commercial page, storm drains with the stormwater service, and treatment mechanics with the reclamation facility. The dispatch machine and its two published lists are the emergency page‘s ground. For the wider state see our Utah service areas.
No office, address, crew or response time of ours is stated for Salt Lake City, and we are not claiming to be based in this city. We print no phone digits on this page: numbers and schedules change, a static copy eventually misleads, and the department’s current pages are the record.