Duncan Avenue residents deal with sewage flooding
Courtesy of Kelly Engel
Two feet of sewer water backs up in the basement of a Duncan Avenue home owned by Aaron and Kelly Engel.
A foot of sewer water backs up in the basement of an Allison Avenue home owned by Cecilia and Klinton Knox.
While countless homeowners across the county have dealt with flooded basements over the past few months, residents of Duncan Avenue in Washington have it worse – sewage backing up into their basements every time it rains.
“You can tell when it’s sewage,” Aaron Engel, who lives in the 600 block of Duncan Avenue, said after the area’s last rainstorm. “Our whole house stunk. The water that came in this last time was a mix, but it’s not clean water – it smells.”
Engel and his wife, Kelly, said the last time their house flooded a couple of weeks ago, they had about two feet of black water in their basement.
“I’m scared because we still have a whole spring to get through,” Kelly said. “We’re worried about our home. How many times can our furnace, washer, dryer and other appliances have three feet of water flooding them and still work?”
Across the street from the Engels, Cara Fisher and her fiancé, Brian Miller, have had the same problem with black water and sewage bubbling up from drains in their basement and garage. Fisher said on Feb. 15, they had just under a foot of water in their basement.
“It was raining really hard, and it happened fast,” she said. “I started rushing things upstairs and started shoveling the water and sewage out the door.”
She spent 45 minutes shoveling sewage before it started to go back down the drain.
By then, she was physically ill from the stench.
“It’s sewage coming up from the drains every time,” she said. “We weren’t prepared for any of this.”
Cecilia and Klinton Knox on Allison Avenue are in the same neighborhood and same situation. They’ve had “floaters and toilet paper” coming into their basement from their drains.
“This only happens when it rains – we don’t have any sewage or plumbing issues in our house,” Cecilia said. “It’s a health hazard, and I have a 6-month-old baby.”
Cecilia said she contacted the Washington-East Washington Joint Authority and was told to purchase a $3,000 backflow preventer, which would stop the sewage from coming into her house.
“Coming up with $3,000 is not necessarily an option for us right now,” she said. “I think it should be the joint authority’s responsibility to install them. The homeowners shouldn’t be responsible.”
The question of responsibility was raised by Engel, Fisher and other residents during Monday’s Washington City Council meeting, when they asked what the city could do to mitigate the problem.
The city engineer, Sarah Boyce of Widmer Engineering, said that if residents are having a sewage problem, that would most likely be an issue for the joint authority.
“Sanitary sewage is not the issue of the city,” she said.
Councilman Ken Westcott told the residents that part of the problem could be the “unique” amount of rain and flooding the city has seen this year.
“We’re seeing flooding this year where we’ve never seen flooding before,” he said.
The following day, Westcott reached out to the joint authority to see if they could put cameras in the sanitary sewer lines on Duncan to check for blockages.
“They need to determine why sewage is going into those people’s homes,” Westcott said of the joint authority.
“They have been very cooperative with the city in working on this issue.”
However, joint authority solicitor Lane Turturice said the flooding is a municipal issue.
“It’s the city’s responsibility to have a stormwater management plan,” he said. “If you’re not catching the rain on top, it’s going to seep down into the ground and into the other utilities. It’s going to cause backups.”
Since the sewage only backs up during major rainstorms, he said it doesn’t seem to be an issue with the main sewer line, but rather an issue of “infiltration,” or groundwater finding its way into the sewer system.
“The majority of infiltration issues are the responsibility of the homeowner,” he said. “We have no knowledge that it’s our responsibility.”
Turturice said the authority is “ready and willing” to collaborate with the city to find a solution to the problem.
“The authority will do anything they can to help alleviate the situation,” he said.
Turturice said in an email that if it’s a problem with the main sewer line, the joint authority would be responsible for repairs. However, if it’s a problem with the lateral line, which runs from the house to the main line, than the property owner is responsible for repairs.
“Over the years, it is the experience of the authority that most sewage backup problems are the result of issues related to failures in the lateral sewage lines of property owners,” he said in the email.
One possible reason for the backup, Turturice said, could be that some of these older houses had their stormwater from downspouts and gutters improperly tied into the sanitary system instead of the stormwater system.
Westcott agreed that improper tie-ins could be the issue for Duncan residents. If that’s the case, Westcott said, responsibility would fall on the homeowner.
“That would be the only way I can think of that stormwater would be getting into the sanitary,” he said. “If it was clear water, we’d think maybe it was coming from the storm drain, but it’s not. Even if the storm lines are clogged, stormwater wouldn’t be getting into the sanitary line because that’s a closed system.”
Both Westcott and Turturice said residents could request a dye test that would determine whether their stormwater lines were improperly tied into the sanitary sewer line.
Turturice said in his email that addressing the flooding will take a “collaborative effort from all levels of government.”
He said the joint authority plans to attend the city’s flood summit at 2 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.
The meeting was scheduled for countywide municipalities to brainstorm for solutions to the flooding. Turturice called it a “step in the right direction.”
“The authority plans to participate and weigh in with the other participants and contribute to the discussion of finding a solution to the flooding woes of the local community,” he said in the email.