Spectrum News 1 | Thanksgiving Feature
November 26, 2025
WAUWATOSA, Wis. — Thanksgiving is a time when many people welcome lots of guests into their home. Unless they are friends or family members, chances are that a plumber is not on that guest list.
However, it is an all-too-common occurrence that plumbers end up making an appearance due to unexpected issues with pipes, drains and toilets.
What You Need To Know
- The day after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest for plumbers
- Milestone Plumbing in Wauwatosa remains very busy
- Many common issues are easily avoidable
The day after Thanksgiving is often cited as one of the busiest days of the year for plumbers. Last year the online review website Yelp said searches for “emergency plumbing” and “24 hour plumbers” surged 65% the day after Thanksgiving.
The industry has a term for it — Brown Friday. The title is perhaps a bit less cringy than it sounds. Instead of relating to the bathroom, it refers instead to grease and food waste that clog pipes and garbage disposals.
Jessie Cannizzaro is a master plumber and owns Milestone Plumbing in Wauwatosa. She said things get very busy around Thanksgiving, and most of it relates to clogged pipes.
“Friday morning when we open up at 7:30, our office team will get hit with tons of emails and voicemails, just with the plumbing systems being overburdened, couldn’t take it, and now we have drains backed up,” said Cannizzaro.
Cannizzaro said the cause of many drain issues is people putting foods down disposals that they shouldn’t, or when it comes to Thanksgiving, people putting things like vegetable scraps down the drain in quantities they never normally would.
“Typically for a Thanksgiving dinner, it is not a couple potatoes, you are peeling the entire bag of potatoes, you have large quantities of these peels, and you start to push those down inside of the drain, in the garbage disposal, now there is not enough water to really mix as you are chopping that up, it becomes a very solid dense blockage,” said Cannizzaro.
Garbage disposal blockages are one of the primary reasons Milestone gets calls post-Thanksgiving. While some issues require professional assistance from a plumber, many disposal blockages can be fixed at home. She demonstrated how to safely un-jam a disposal.
Cannizzaro also warned about putting grease down drains. She said even if you pour cooking grease into a separate receptacle, it is a good idea to still wipe out pots and pans with paper towel before putting them in the sink to clean, as even small amounts of grease can eventually build up and create a problem.