A septic backup doesn't wait for business hours, and it only gets worse the longer it sits. Raw sewage inside the house is a health hazard — and on the large lots — some near the borough's lakes and brooks — that define Franklin Lakes, a failing system can also reach a private well on the same property or the surface water the borough works to protect. When it's happening right now, the fastest help is a phone call. For an active emergency, calling beats filling out the form every time.
This is an emergency — call now and stop running water.
Call right away if you have
- Sewage or wastewater backing up into toilets, tubs, or floor drains.
- Several fixtures failing at the same time across the house.
- Effluent pooling, surfacing, or reeking over the tank or drain field.
- Sewage odors indoors that won't clear.
- A septic or pump alarm sounding and not resetting.
- Backups that start during or right after heavy rain or snowmelt.
What to do while you wait for us
- Stop using water. Hold off on laundry, the dishwasher, and long showers — every gallon you send down makes a backup worse.
- Keep people and pets away from any sewage. Treat it as a biohazard and don't track it through the house.
- Skip the chemical drain openers. They won't clear a septic backup, and they can make the cleanup and the repair harder.
- If a pump or high-water alarm is sounding, you can usually silence it, but leave the system itself to us.
- Note what changed — recent rain, when it started, the last time the tank was pumped. It helps us arrive ready.
How we respond
When you call, we work to reach you quickly, find the cause on site, and relieve the immediate problem — usually by pumping the tank and clearing the blockage so the house is usable again. Because Franklin Lakes requires a Board of Health permit and a licensed installer for any actual repair — down to lids, risers, and baffles — we separate the emergency stabilization from the permitted fix. Then we tell you straight whether you're looking at a simple correction or a larger septic repair, and exactly what each one takes.
Why emergencies happen here
Outside the small sewered Central Business District, most Franklin Lakes homes run on septic, so backups are a real and recurring problem across the borough. Most trace back to one of a few things: a tank that's gone too long between pump-outs, a drain field saturated after a wet stretch, or a failed pump on a mound, pressure-distribution, or aerobic treatment system. The local glacial-till uplands don't help — dense, slow-draining Boonton soils with a seasonal high water table from late fall into spring leave less margin than sandy ground, so a system already near capacity tends to fail during exactly the storms you'd least want it to.
There is no local ordinance forcing a pumping schedule in Franklin Lakes, but a sensible maintenance routine prevents a large share of these calls. Once we've handled the emergency, we'll help you set uproutine pumping on a schedule that fits your household and soils — so the next heavy rain isn't a crisis. For the current requirements, the Franklin Lakes Board of Health and NJDEPare the authoritative sources.