For years, the school at Calvary Apostolic Church has been a fountain of knowledge for its young people.

But last Friday it was another kind of fountain that greeted teachers arriving for school and had church members praying for deliverance.

"When the teachers came in for school, they smelled this horrible smell, and saw a fountain of sewage coming up the sewer drain," said John Knott, spokesman for the church, located at 5900 E. Yale Ave.

By the time the backup was under control, 2 inches of reeking sludge had covered 1,100 square feet of basement-level classrooms.

The rooms are used for Sunday school and house a school for preschoolers through high school seniors during the week.

In even worse shape was the below-ground furnace room, where 8 inches of raw sewage was slathered across the floor and up the drywall.

It even clogged up the furnace itself.

Knott said the culprit is believed to be a 4-inch tree root that had worked its way into the main municipal sewage line located 12 feet off the church's property and managed by the Holly Hills Water and Sanitation District. (The church's sewer service and fire protection is provided by Holly Hills, a 10-block geographic squiggle that's part of unincorporated Arapahoe County.)

On Tuesday, five days after the backup, Knott is distressed because he believes the sanitation district hasn't kept church officials fully updated on what will happen next.

"The basement's a wreck, totally unusable," Knott said. "Our furnace is still out. The people who did the cleanup threw out all the furniture in the Dumpster. They said the inside of the furnace has raw sewage in it and that's beyond their scope. If we ran the furnace, the odor would spread throughout the sanctuary."

"We're just out. Out big time."

Sanitation district manager Ann Finn was out of the office Tuesday, but the president of the company that provides management services for Holly Hills and 189 other sanitation districts in Colorado said the district quickly sent out a cleanup crew, an engineer to inspect the break and an insurance assessor.

"At this point, we don't know the cause and we don't know the responsible party," said Debbie McCoy.

"But (the sanitation district) certainly isn't dragging its feet."

Unless there's proven negligence, municipalities are usually immune from liability for sewage backups, said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

And even though the backup wasn't the church's fault and occurred off its property, the church probably can't get damage reimbursement because it doesn't have a special insurance rider covering such an event.

All in all, Knott isn't hopeful that the church will recover easily from the sewage disaster: "My overall feeling is, we're going to take a shower on this one."

How you can avoid the same problem

• Homeowners can easily find themselves in the same sewage fix as Calvary Apostolic Church. Municipalities usually won't reimburse property owners for damage from sewer backups if they originated under a city street or other government-regulated land. By law, government entities are generally immune from liability and the property owner must prove negligence to collect.

Here's how you can protect yourself:

• Property owners should consider adding an inexpensive rider to their insurance policy. It usually costs no more than a few dollars a month, with a $1,000 deductible. That would cover cleanup, structural repair and replacement of contents. If the damage from a sewage backup happened on the owners' property, that's usually covered by homeowners insurance.Source: Carole Walker, Executive Director Of The Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

torkelsonj@rockymountainnews.com or 303-954-5055