Commode Cannon

My house is located about a hundred feet from a street intersection. A couple days ago, I looked out my front window and I saw some kind of industrial utility truck stopped on my street at the intersection. The truck had a large—about 12-inch diameter—hose coming from it and going down into the street through an open manhole. I surmised that the city was working on a water line or a sewer line and gave the matter no more thought.

The next day the truck and the large hose were back, and the hose was down under the street again. That didn't surprise me—some jobs take more than one day. I was in the living room and Nuria was in the bathroom when she called to me, "Where did all this water come from?" 

I went to the bathroom and I saw drops of water all over the toilet seat. Then I saw that water was all over the floor around the toilet. Indeed, where did all this water come from? Then I saw that over half of the water in the toilet bowl was missing. The connection was obvious: the truck had blown high pressure air into the sewer line, perhaps to unblock the line. The high pressure air flowed into residential sewer lines and into toilets. I envisioned the toilet water shooting upward like a fountain at the Bellagio. 

I asked a friend who lives six houses down the street from my home if he had experienced a similar water event in his bathroom, and he confirmed that he had. So this was quite a blast of air, to still be so powerful that far from the manhole. What if someone had been sitting on their toilet when the contents of the toilet were expelled upward by high-pressure air? The word "uncomfortable" is the nicest word I can think of for such an event. Certain parts of the human anatomy do not respond well to being blasted by water under high pressure. 

It gives one pause to know that at any moment, without warning, one might be knocked off their toilet by a mixture of high-pressure air, water, and, uh, whatever might have been floating in that water.