City Work Busts Sewer Line, Nearly Puts Cheyenne Shop Out Of Business

Standing at 314 W. 17th Street in Cheyenne is a store filled with an eclectic collection of curiosities not just from Wyoming, but all over the world.

Ammonites from Morocco, malachite from Zaire, jaguar pots that date to the pre-Columbian Nicoya culture found in present-day Costa Rica.

There’s agatized coral from Florida, sparkling fingers of crystal quartz and polished slices of mammoth teeth found in Venice, Florida.

The treasures make up Bohemian Metals, owned by Cheyenne native Brian Snyder.

It was a youthful dream to own the store, one Snyder has spent decades making happen.

“I was taking classes out at the community college for archaeology, and then I started taking some electives for jewelry making,” Snyder told Cowboy State Daily. “I got into jewelry making, and I was selling some stuff, so I continued with that, and I started up a little business on 16th Street in the Plains Hotel.”

Eventually in 1999, Snyder convinced a bank to loan him enough money for his own shop on 17th Street.

“It’s taken a long time to build up to this,” Snyder said. “And it’s lots and lots of labor that people don’t understand. You know, the work and the restoration, it’s all something I’ve done myself. I didn’t farm this out to somebody else. I didn’t have the money, so everything in here is something I did myself.”

Sometimes You’re The Windshield, Sometimes You’re The Bug

While it took years and years of work to get where Snyder is now, he almost lost everything in the blink of an eye, and it wasn’t even his fault.

He remembers the day his nightmare on 17th Street began like it was yesterday.

“It was during the pandemic, and they were doing construction in the street,” Snyder said. “And it all had to do with the courthouse on the corner. They were running a fiber optic line and stuff like that.”

Snyder didn’t think too much about it other than it was noisy, and it was blocking customers from getting to his business.

But that was just an inconvenience.

Then one day a contractor hit Bohemian Metal’s sewer line.

“And they were drilling with this stuff, they were using bentonite, which is, you know bentonite clay,” Snyder said. “It’s a naturally occurring mineral that comes from Wyoming.”

Bentonite is often used in drilling applications as lubrication. It looks like a grey sludgy mud.

“But so, when they hit the sewer line and wrecked it, all this water and all this material went down my sewer line,” Snyder said. “It went into the bathroom in the back where it hit my sump pump. And it tried, but couldn’t pump it out.”

Next thing Snyder knew, sewage, mud and gravel mixed in with loads of bentonite were coming up through his washer and floor drains. The sludge even made it as far as the one room he’d thought safe, the place where he’d stored 15 years’ worth of fossils obtained in Kemmerer and various other locations.

It destroyed what Snyder said was valued at nearly $40,000 worth of inventory by an appraiser he later hired to inventory damages.

Changing Their Tune

Initially, the city seemed sympathetic to the disaster and it seemed the contractor was going to help Snyder.

But as the damages began to add up, everyone’s tune seemed to change, Snyder said.

Next thing he knew, he was getting cease and desist letters instead of promises to help, as well as a letter informing him that the contractor was not at fault after all.

The contractor’s letter blamed the city, saying that the city of Cheyenne’s “alleged improper marking of sewer line by the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities (BOPU),” resulting in a third-party strike the contractor is not liable for.

Meanwhile, BOPU told Snyder that it wasn’t going to cover any of the damages either because, in its view, the break was all the contractor’s fault.

Snyder started shopping around for attorneys, but found himself stymied. While his damages were crippling for a small business owner like himself who had done everything from scratch, they didn’t seem to be great enough to interest attorneys in taking his case.

“I had some money,” Snyder said. “People had donated to, like, a GoFundMe page and stuff like that. But so many of these (attorneys) either worked for the city or they wanted to.”

Three-quarters of his calls to attorneys went unanswered altogether, Snyder said.

The few who did call back either referred him to someone else or told him straight up they didn’t want to take his case. To them, it wasn’t worth the risk it would affect their chances of future work with the city of Cheyenne, Snyder told Cowboy State Daily.

“They referred me around and around and around,” he said. “And that is a polite way of telling you they don’t want to do it. Some were blunt and honest. I mean, anything involving the city is a big deal. The city is incredibly hard to sue, and (attorneys) just quite honestly didn’t see any money in it. Or not enough money in it for them.”

Eventually, a friend of a friend found an attorney who tried to help Snyder. But that attorney died during the course of the ordeal, Snyder said, and the statute of limitations ran out for Snyder to do anything more through the legal system.

A Little Help From Friends

What made the real difference was a public social media campaign Snyder kept up throughout the ordeal. People called the city on his behalf to urge it to do right by their friend.

Thanks to that, Snyder was eventually able to exert enough pressure on the city that it finally came and helped him clean out and repair his sewer line at least so he could function again as a business.

“When they did finally come out, they were visibly angry that they were being forced to come here and deal with this problem that the city had created,” Snyder said. “And nobody before or after that offered to help me with any of the losses they created with the damage of my property, or anything that we went through for two months like that, without being able to run water.”

It was especially distressing at the time because his wife was recovering after a trip to the emergency room, Snyder added. They faced up to $300,000 in medical bills as a result of that. But what really added to Snyder’s personal distress was feeling that he couldn’t provide an appropriate environment for his wife’s recovery.

“We were facing the very real prospect of homelessness,” he said. “Because you can’t live in a place where you don’t have, if your sewer line’s gone and you can’t even run water.”

BOPU Says City Did What It Could

Brad Brooks, director of the Board of Public Utilities, told Cowboy State Daily he was around when the incident happened.

“Yeah, I went round and round with, is it Brian?” Brooks said when asked about the incident and why the city didn’t do more to help Snyder at the time. “You know, we tried to do all we could, but I don’t know that I made him happy.”

Brooks acknowledged it was a “tough situation” for Snyder.

“A sewer service like that is the responsibility of the homeowner,” Brooks said. “But people aren’t supposed to drill through them either.”

Brooks added that he doesn’t know anything about the final settlement.

“We went down and tried to help Brian get it sucked out,” he said. “I know we made a repair out in the street on it, but we didn’t get involved in any of the claim portion.

“So, I know it’s tough for people to understand, and it doesn’t always make sense. But when it comes to claims, the city’s claims are dealt with separately from the Board of Public Utilities claims, because we’re two separate entities.”

Getting By, Standing Tall

Today, most of the visible signs of devastation that happened at Bohemian Metals as a result of the third-party sewer line strike are gone, and Snyder seems to have taken it all in stride.

“It was an educational experience,” Snyder told Cowboy State Daily. “And it was like reinforcing things that I kind of already knew anyway. You know, when you’re hanging out there with half of your life and your property and your business, and people do that to you, it really gets your attention.”

There’s still a little spot in the ceiling at Bohemian Metals that Snyder will eventually get repaired. It’s a spot customers can see if they happen to be staring at the ceiling.

“I’ve had to basically fix everything else myself,” Snyder said. “And I still have things I’ll have to do.”

Most people, of course, aren’t looking up when they’re in Bohemian Metals.

They’re looking at shelf after shelf of all these unique artifacts that Snyder has somehow managed to collect from around the world. Like 200-year-old trade beads — some of them just like the blue beads Columbus would have brought with him to the New World — or the homo erectus axe that was one of the first trade goods in the historical record, or the Bronze Age lamp from Persia that dates back to 4,000 or 5,000 B.C.

And it’s OK with Snyder that customers don’t notice the little scars left behind by what happened to his store when his sewer line was struck one pretty summer day in 2020.

Life’s a journey, some of it good, some of it bad. And it’s always good to remember that what doesn’t kill us inevitably makes us stronger.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.