Buyers Beware!

Buyers Beware:  Orangeberg tile maybe your worse enemy and you didn't even know about it.

After WWII the very common product used for sewer lines in cities was a tile they named Orangeberg.  This innocent looking product appears normal enough:

 Problem with this product is that it is actually Coal Tar Impregnated Wood Fiber Pipe.   Here is a website with sewer history

http://www.sewerhistory.org/grfx/components/pipe-orng1.htm

(How in the world were people able to sell homes without the web years ago?  We have so much history available to us now...but that's the topic for another blog.)

So this cardboard pipe fails.  What a surprise...NOT.  Problem for us as Realtors, we need to know which neighborhoods have Orangeberg and which do not.  Even then the records are not totally correct.

Here is a document of a sewer line failure on the west side of AA:

http://www.apin.com/401/main.htm

If I have a buyer you can bet the offer will include a request for exploratory investigation of the sewer lines and if I list a home, I'll try to find facts about the sewer line.