Ways to Identify Nonconforming Sewers

Portland Maps is a city website that shows the locations of sewer assets and permitted sewer connections, along with permit records. Since records searching exceeds the scope of a sewer scope, real estate brokers should use this resource to interpret sewer scope results.

Property title documents may list sewer easements that could indicate nonconforming sewers, and are available from counties typically. Easements are an important consideration for any property, so this research is important to have done.

Since line location is a time-consuming additional task, it is typically unnecessary and not done with most sewer scopes. However, if there are indications from the sewer scope or records of a nonconforming sewer, follow up investigations should be done. This may involve having a sewer contractor do a second sewer scope along with line locating. Follow up with a licensed plumbing contractor would be most useful, since they can evaluate options and costs to correct the problem.