Many Health Districts in Ohio require some sort of third party involvement in their design and approval process for household sewage treatment devices. I've asked several of my colleagues why they do this. Their reply is always the same: to limit their liability. If something goes wrong, they can always point the finger at someone else and say it was someone else's fault.
I've never been able to figure this kind of logic. I'm guessing this attitude was developed over several decades of having to suffer though numerous failed septic systems.
I think that this kind of thinking, blaming others for your own shortcomings, is not the right thing to do. I think that we must remember that first of all we are in the prevention business and the best way to prevent anybody from suing you, or worse yet, collecting damages from you, is to provide the customer with a product that performs as it was intended to perform. That is to say, a local health department should be able to ensure that the household sewage treatment system that goes in the ground is the best product that it can be. Let me be more specific. The HSTS should, at a very minimum, 1.) not discharge anything off the lot; 2) last the lifetime of the house without malfunction; and 3) require only a minimum of maintenance (one diversion device and/or one pump). As a homeowner, I should expect nothing less. And it should be guaranteed.
Impossible? Not so. It is very possible to design, drawn specs for and oversee the installation of such systems. Greene County has been doing it since 1973. No design related failures since. Miami County has been doing it since 1999. No design failures since.
But lets get back to the liability issue. I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness), so anything I say here you might wish to check with your legal counsel. Ask you legal counsel this: If we approve a HSTS that was designed by a third party PE and it fails within some short period of time, can people sue us and collect, or are we somehow protected from liability? The fact is that you are just another potential pot of money. Plaintiffs usually sue everybody that's touched the thing, jsut to see what will stick.
But even this misses the point. In my years of public health service I've found that the best way to avoid lawsuits and judgments is to do the right thing in the first place. If the public places its trust in you to do the right thing, then you should be ensuring that your product is the best that it can be, which means that it should perform as mentioned above. A product that works and doesn't fail is unlikely to attract lawsuits. And a lawsuit that isn't filed costs you nothing.
So don't try to shift your responsibility to others. Instead, take your own responsibility seriously and give people a product that works. No failures, no lawsuits.
I came to this blog on the advice of a letter to the published on December 30 in the Troy Daily News. The letter was first a rant against some health department regulations and then it turned in to a personal attack on the commissioner. Obviously the letter writer is completely missing the point as to why regulations are required. But I am really not sure whether the letter writer was more upset over septic system regulations or the grammar in this blog.
Posted by: Bennie Goodenglish | December 30, 2006 at 08:59 AM