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My name is Andy, and I was a sanitary sewer abuser.
Whenever it rained, and manholes in my part of town overflowed with raw sewage, it was partly my fault.
I can now say I've put my problem behind me. But for years, I contributed to the sewer woes that now are forcing Lexington to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next dozen years, or face stiff fines from the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
In my defense, I didn't know how bad my problem was. And my wife and children, who lived under the same roof, never suspected anything was wrong.
There are many other people in Lexington who are just like I was. To them, I have this advice: Get help.
Thanks to the city's Sump Pump Redirection Program, I can sleep at night even when there's rain on the roof, knowing that the right kind of water is leaving my basement through the right pipe.
And it didn't cost me a dime.
That's because the city uses public funds to correct decades-old plumbing practices.
When my house was built, sometime around 1950, it was common for sumps -- those wells that are hooked to pumps to help keep basements dry -- to be connected to sanitary sewer lines. Many homes in Lexington's older neighborhoods have similar setups.
Sumps are supposed to be hooked to a pipe that runs outside the house, with the idea that the water eventually will find its way to a storm sewer, then to a stream.
The city says the average house produces about 300 gallons of sewage a day. When it rains, a sump pump can add 1,000 gallons to that total.
I had looked at the setup in my basement. I saw the sewer line that ran from the bathrooms and out a wall of the basement. I saw a smaller pipe that came out of the sump and went out the wall at a different spot.
I thought that pipe connected to the storm sewer out at the street. I thought I was OK.
But a couple of months ago, I took a closer look. The washing machine and a sink in the basement emptied into the sump.
Did that mean that soapy water was going to a stream when I did laundry? That water the color of the walls in my house was polluting the stream when I washed out a paintbrush?
Having written articles for the newspaper about the sump pump program, I wondered if it would pay for moving the sink and washing machine connections out of the sump.
I called LexCall (you just dial 311) on a Monday. On Tuesday, someone called me back. On Wednesday, we met at my house at lunchtime.
It turned out that, just outside my house, the pipe from the sump connected with the sanitary sewer line.
That meant that when we got a lot of rain, and my sump pump was kicking on every minute or so, I was sending many gallons of water to the sanitary sewers that should have been going to storm sewers.
It was as if I stood in the bathroom when it was raining and flushed the toilet again and again and again.
But, two weeks after the first call, Paul Currens from Benjamin Franklin Plumbing was at my house with a helper and lots of tools. He has a contract with the city to do the redirections.
He hooked up a bucket and pump behind the washing machine and sink.
Now, when I wash clothes or use the sink, the water goes into the bucket, then to the sewer line.
He also cut the outside connection between the sump line and the sewer line, and extended the sump line a few yards away from the house. Currens told me that fixing my house cost $2,700 to $2,800. A simpler fix, without the washing machine and sink, would have been cheaper. Charles Martin, director of the city's Division of Water and Air Quality, said the average job costs $1,000 to $1,500.
It's worth that, he said, to avoid treating water that doesn't need to be treated.
"The sump pump program in my mind has a fairly high return on investment," he said.
The current budget for the program is $400,000. The program started in 1998. A little more than 1,000 sumps have been redirected since then.
Currens finished with my house on Wednesday. When it started raining steadily on Friday, my conscience was clear.
