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Every once in a while, one of Greg Leger’s Roto-Rooter crews arrive to find a home turned into a scene of nightmarish destruction.

The toilets have backed up. The yard has turned into a septic field. And the home’s sewage pipe, incredibly, has almost completely dissolved.

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The pipe is “just mush,” said Leger, operations manager for Ontario Roto-Rooter.

“We have to get a pump truck out to vacuum out all the sewage from the front lawn — just an absolute mess.”

We have to get a pump truck out to vacuum out all the sewage from the front lawn — just an absolute mess

And as the homeowner sees their yard and garden attacked by entrenching equipment, there is little comfort for why this has happened. Because, for a couple decades after the Second World War, Canada thought it would be a good idea to install sewer pipes made out of cardboard.

Thousands of kilometres of pipe. Hundreds of thousands of homes. The pipe once trumpeted as a home-building miracle has done millions upon millions of dollars in damage, and remains a ticking time bomb for unsuspecting residents across Canada.