Sewer camera inspection in Dunn Loring.

Fairfax County’s tax records list 742 houses with a 22027 address, and the old roads are the most mixed. Sandburg Street has 63: eleven built before 1960, the earliest in 1900, among houses from the 1980s to 2025. Gallows Road, Railroad Street, Idylwood Road and Elm Place read the same way, a 1920s or 1950s house on a big lot beside one forty or fifty years newer.

On those older lots the line to the main is as old as whoever laid it. Before 1960 that usually meant clay or cast iron, and from the late 1940s into the early 1970s some builders used Orangeburg, pipe made of wood fiber soaked in tar, which goes soft and oval with age and can shred under a drain cutter. On a house from those decades, the camera goes in first.

Then there are the courts one builder finished in a season or two: Timber Valley Court in 1969, Bright Meadows Lane in the mid 1970s, Arden Court and Shawn Court at the end of that decade. Every lateral on a court like that went in within a year or two. If the house next door had roots cut out of its line, yours has spent the same decades in the same ground.

Nearly eight houses in ten went up from 1980 on, from Regal Oaks on Journet Drive in the mid 1990s to Harithy Drive and Coal Train Drive in the early 2000s. Those lines are plastic, laid in what the county’s soil map mostly labels as graded, compacted fill. A trench through fill can settle unevenly, and a low spot that holds water is one of the likeliest finds in a younger line that keeps backing up.