BY AMALIJA, JAKE AND ELLIOT

On September 13 our school went into lockdown because of some stinky toilets. All the toilets unexpectedly stopped working causing them to overflow as well as all sorts of chaos.

The drama began about five minutes before lunch. The Year 4, 5 & 6 students were in the playground when the teachers rang the bell telling everyone to form a line. They said we have had to email your parents because all the toilets have stopped functioning. And they said we could use the toilets but not flush it – and only if you were desperate. All the students were cheering and running around the playground as they heard the sudden news that they were going home three hours early.

For the students who were still inside their classrooms at the time, their teachers told them the news too. But they also could not use the toilets unless it was an emergency.

There were all kinds of rumours about how the toilets were blocked.

Lego! Oranges! Sweetcorn! Lanyards!

The Mog Chronicle gained an exclusive interview with Mr. Alfie, the JKPS caretaker, who told us what really happened.

Mr. Alfie said it was the limescale in one of the bends in the basement which stopped the water from flowing. It got so bad that the water was confused which path to go and came back out of the drains.

Here we can show you an exclusive photos of the source of the blockage:

Mr. Alfie explained that it started in the disabled toilet next to the office. “The plug hole in the floor was bubbling up,” he said. It flowed into the hallway and into the office. It was very serious,” he said.

Industrial cleaners had to be called because the flooding was so bad.

In the blocked pipes they found a lanyard, little Lego bricks, some rubber cleaner gloves and more than 20 pencils as well as one big purple Duplo building block.

On the day of the massive blockage, parents started to rush to the school to pick up their children. Some parents were at work, so other parents kindly picked their kids up for them. There were teachers outside with walkie talkies giving messages to teachers inside so they knew which kids were being picked up. Mr. Elikem and Coach Leo were flying around like superheroes, shouting out the names of the children whose parents were waiting outside.

Here is the full interview with Mr. Alfie:

What happened?

“Due to all of the little kids going to the toilet, there was a build up of limescale in the pipes which is as hard as concrete. It builds up in the corners of all the pipes and any toilet paper, any pencils, any Lego – anything else that any kid can find that can be flushed – gets blocked in those corners. Then every time someone flushes the toilet, the water doesn’t know where to go but back up the way it came. And that’s how we had everything coming back out of the toilets really.”

“It was very serious. It started in the disabled toilet next to the office. The waste water filled the hallway and made its way into the offices. It stained the carpets. We needed industrial cleaners to come and properly clean.”

How long did it take to unblock it? 

“Every time it got blocked and we had to call someone out it was about a two hour job. But the day that we had them come to properly fix it it was about a six hour job. They came from 4pm and there were here until about 11.30pm.”

Who was to blame? 

“You. All of you lot! All the kids. A couple of teachers too. There is about 430 students so that’s 430 lots of wee and poos. And anything else they choose to put down the toilet.”

What did you find? 

“We managed to find a couple of cleaners gloves, a lanyard, couple bits of Duplo – a purple building block. Lego. pencils – too many to count. I’d say a classroom’s worth.” 

“That was the worst day – the day it managed to come out and go into the office. The other days we got to it pretty quickly because we knew what was happening. And we didn’t have to shut the school. We very nearly did. The second to last time it happened we were very nearly going to cancel the after school clubs.”

Is it fixed now? 

“Yes and no. So they got rid of all the limescale. They managed to clear it all. But where the building is so old, half of the plumbing is new and half of the plumbing is part of the old building. And in the basement there is a pipe that bends down and comes back up. That bend was used by the old plumbing to stop the smell but the new plumbing doesn’t need it and that U bend just blocks things and causes blockage on its own.”

Did they use any cool tools to unblock it?

“There was some pretty interesting stuff. They used what’s called a key hole camera where you get a 20 metre long piece of rope with a camera on the end and you just get into the pipe and feed it in so they can see what’s going on with the pipes.”

“There was a drill with a tube on it and on the end of the tube were chains. Five chains sprayed out. So the chains spin really fast and that was to get rid of the blockage.”

“The tissue was the main problem actually because it’s hard to break down.”

Have you got a message to the children? 

“Try to use less tissue if you can and stop putting Lego down the toilet and lanyards and pencils and whatever else you can find. Just put what needs to go down.”

How did they know it was fixed? 

“Once the workers did all the jobs they gave me this little plastic jar filled with brown gold dust. I had to pour that into the toilet and it dyed the water. You know the highlighter or high vis colour? Really bright yellow. I had to flush the toilet and they had to go out to the playground and look down in through the ground and see the flow of the highlighted water. But the problem is that the dye lasted for a very long time so it looked like there was a lot of wee in the toilets for a while. It was a really,really bright colour.”

“If it didn’t come through we’ve still got a blockage somewhere but it did. And fingers crossed it stays that way.”