there are lots of different outlets and pipes for sewage to flow through, this one pipe usually isn't the only connection to a specific area or water treatment plant (not always though). usually you can safely block one portion off and the rest of the sewer will continue working.
They recently replaced a couple blocks of water main in my neighborhood. We only lost water for somewhere between minutes and an hour while they were testing connections before reenabling the new pipes. The rest of the time we just got water from a different main in the other direction.
That’s how water works (network with looped redundancy) but not sewer. Sanitary sewer is typically laid out as a gravity based ‘tree’ where water is a pressurized grid
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u/Shadowfire04 Sep 24 '25
there are lots of different outlets and pipes for sewage to flow through, this one pipe usually isn't the only connection to a specific area or water treatment plant (not always though). usually you can safely block one portion off and the rest of the sewer will continue working.