Continued: Home buyers on hook to repair bad septic system

Eric and Toni Kohnke knew something was wrong when the guy they hired to pump out their septic tank told them to get a lawyer.

It was 2006, less than a year after they bought their rambler in Andover. Then the real trouble began. The toilets backed up. The laundry room and shower flooded. Now the family goes out of town for the weekend to get away from the house. And the Kohnkes don't trust drinking water from their well.

The Kohnkes face going into $30,000 of debt to redesign the septic system for the home they've lived in for three years. The septic system was substandard, everyone agrees, but the people who sold the house to the Kohnkes thought they had fixed the problem. The city says it's the state's responsibility and the state says it's the city's problem.

If the Kohnkes had hired a septic system inspector before buying the house, the troubles might have been detected. But family members say they had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.

In the past two years, the Kohnkes have demanded action from the city of Andover, prompted an investigation by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency; held an arbitration hearing against the people who sold them the house, and filed a complaint with the Minnesota Association of Realtors. It's all been to no avail.

"No one seems to want to take responsibility," said Eric Kohnke, 36. "We thought we did everything right."

The home was built in 1961. The current problem dates to January 2001, when a septic system inspector apparently failed to notice one of the two cesspools located on the property, according to MPCA documents. The inspector is now retired.

The owners of the house in 2003 installed a new septic tank, thinking that would solve the problem. The city of Andover inspected and approved that installation.

The Kohnkes bought the house in September 2005. For a time, everything worked well.

Then a routine pumping of the septic tank the next year revealed the lack of a drainfield.

An inspector hired by the Kohnkes in 2007 discovered that the plumbing from one bathroom and the laundry connected to what might be a cesspool, essentially an underground sewage pit.

"We're trying to find whatever's out there on the north side," Eric Kohnke said. A plumber will use a sewer inspection camera to see where the pipes lead.

"It needs to be properly dug up and filled in," he said.

The Kohnke children, who are 8 and 10 years old, can't play in certain areas of the yard for fear of their safety.

Jim vonMeier, an environmental specialist and expert on septic systems, recently visited the property. He called the family's system "garbage."

"The real big nasty is that people bought that property under the assumption that the septic system would not need any work," vonMeier said.

But the Kohnkes learned that the city and the state divide responsibility for septic systems. The state licenses the people who install them. The city makes sure the installations meet proper guidelines.

The Kohnkes tried to hold the sellers and their real estate agent accountable. But an arbitrator found that adequate disclosures were made.

For now, the Kohnkes will load up their credit cards with debt to fix their septic problems. And they want to warn others to be careful when they buy houses with septic systems.

"We definitely do not want this happening to someone else," Kohnke said.

Emily Banks is a University of Minnesota student on assignment for the Star Tribune.