Pancakes For Everyone!

Sometimes the truth is better than fiction.

It was a beautiful day for plumbing, and everything on the schedule was running smoothly—until we received an urgent call from the local homeless shelter. They were experiencing a major sewer backup, and nothing in the building was draining. Time to roll out.

When I arrived, the staff walked me into the kitchen and explained that every fixture in the building was backed up. After a quick diagnostic, it was clear they were right: sinks, toilets, and floor drains were all fully plugged.

I grabbed my main sewer cable, pulled the cleanout, and ran 100 feet of cable down the line. Oddly, it didn’t encounter any resistance at all—but the drain was still completely backed up. Strange. The slick residue on the cable suggested a grease-clogged drain, so we took the next step: high-pressure jetting.

For those who don’t know, a jetter is a powerful drain machine that uses high-pressure water and special nozzles to scour the inside of sewer lines, cutting through grease, sludge, roots—basically anything soft enough to move.

We returned with the trailer jetter and began running water down the line. Within minutes it was obvious that something was very wrong.

Foam—thick, growing, never-ending foam—started bubbling out of every drain in the place. Floor drains erupted like volcanoes. Sinks filled with expanding white mush. Toilets burped up piles of bubbly goo. It looked exactly like those little black snake fireworks that grow into long, wriggling tubes on the 4th of July—except this time everything was white, sticky, and spreading fast.

Even after shutting off the jetter… the foam kept coming.

As I stood there trying to understand the mystery, one of the kitchen helpers started looking nervous. I asked him if he knew anything about what was going on. Hesitantly, he explained that earlier that morning he’d been making pancakes and noticed weevils in the mix. So he checked the bag, found more, and—rather than tossing it in the dumpster—dumped the entire thing down the garbage disposal.

Then he showed me the bag.

Not a grocery-store sized bag.
Not a family-sized bag.
A 50-pound industrial bag of dry pancake mix.

Fifty. Pounds.

I asked him why he didn’t just throw it away outside. He shrugged and walked off.

Suddenly everything made sense. The sewer line wasn’t clogged with grease—it was filled with fifty pounds of dry pancake powder, and the moment the jetter added water…
We basically turned the building’s plumbing system into a giant mixing bowl.

And the batter had to go somewhere.

What followed was hours of jetting, vacuuming, flushing, clearing, and battling mountains of pancake foam. It took a jetter, a cable, shop vacs, and a whole lot of determination to get that line flowing again. But eventually, after gallons and gallons of batter were removed, the drains finally opened up.

All in a day’s work.
And honestly, the only thing missing by the end of it was a hot griddle some butter and a whole lot of maple syrup.

Story by Vic Bachman, Master Plumber, Mike Bachman Plumbing.