Is this the last house in Amsterdam without sewerage? “You can always miss”
35 years under the municipality thought to have connected the last house to the Amsterdam sewer system, it turns out that there is still a building that discharges the waste water in the canal. This week has been solved, but the residents have not really had the last one. “It’s not like these boxes of shit were piled up in the gang here.”
This week the house of Jan Middelkamp and Timon Fokkens on the Warmoesstraat will be connected to the sewer. And it was certainly no easy task to get that done, they say. The yearly, thousands of euros, endless VvE meetings and just as many telephone calls with the municipality and with sewer manager Waternet.
In the first instance, the authorities are assured that the building in the Warmoesstraat is connected to the connections. “From about 1975, the entire city center has been provided with sewerage,” says Thomas Staverman of Waternet. “We were at the date when we had the last property connected to the sewer in 1987.”
Divide
And in fact it was. That changes when a building in the Warmoesstraat is split in the early 1990s. The restaurant on the ground floor is connected to the sewer. But not the parent apartments. Those lozenges put their waste water at the back of the building, in the water of the Damrak. “The five apartments were probably connected to old pipes during the renovation, which still discharged into the Damrak”, Middelkamp suspects. Waternet says it was never informed of the split.
The mistake was discovered by accident when Middelkamp and Fokkens moved from their houseboat on the Amstel to the top apartment of the building in 2016. After painting, Middelkamp rinses the brushes and sees his authenticity suddenly staining the water of the Damrak.
corks
Well-informed plumbers put them to the test and flush corks through all the toilets. Later they all float on the canal water. The municipality and Waternet will be aware of the situation by then.
The end will eventually be six years before Waternet will extend the sewerage system to the front door of the complex in May 2022. “Waternet takes care of the sewerage up to the threshold from to the front garden,” explains Staverman. “Behind that, it’s the owners responsibility”
In total, the entire operation will cost 8,000 euros, of which 5,000 will be charged to the residents. All in all a long and expensive joke, but Middelkamp can’t afford it. “It takes some time now with these kinds of things. And when you buy an old house, you know that there can be rare surprises. It’s part of it.”
In addition, the residents have never had any problems with the connection. “It’s not like the right-handers with shit were piled up here in the hallway. Whether it goes into the canal on the left, or into the sewer, you don’t notice that. Gone is gone.”
Waternet hopes that this will really be the last building to receive a sewer connection. But Staverman does not dare to rule out that it will happen again. “We are here in a performance city, where all kinds of buildings have been put together over the centuries. You can always miss it, as happened here.”