Blocked Drains in Hornsby, Cleared Properly

Most of the attention here goes to the shops and the station. The drains tell a different story, and it starts west of the highway.

Old Mans Valley cuts a deep gully through that side of the suburb, reclaimed in recent years as parkland out of the old Hornsby Quarry. Streets like Florence Street and Dural Street sit above steep, V-shaped drops toward that valley floor.

Every property on the falling side deals with drainage that has to fight gravity the whole way down.

That's before you factor in the pipe stock. Federation and Arts-and-Crafts homes on the older western streets were laid with earthenware clay drainage, the same brittle joints found right across the Upper North Shore.

On a steep fall, those joints don't just crack from age. They shift as the ground below them settles toward the valley, and every shift is an opening for a root.

Mature blackbutts and blue gums line the reserves that ring Old Mans Valley, and their roots go looking for exactly that kind of opening.

We treat a steep, root-affected line here differently to a flat one. Camera work comes first, always, because on this terrain the actual break point can sit well downhill of where the symptom shows up.

Once we know where it is, pipe relining often fixes it without digging into a slope that's already doing enough work holding itself together.

The valley and ridge terrain shapes almost everything else we see out here too.

Catching any of these early beats discovering them as sewage at the boundary overnight.

This shire sits close enough to Wahroonga that a Hornsby job is routine, never a detour. Hornsby Shire Council covers this side of the boundary, and our vans have the quickest way down to the western streets worked out already.

That's not a small thing on this terrain. Knowing which streets fall which way toward Old Mans Valley, and which ones have the older clay stock, means less time working out the problem and more time fixing it.