Two Walton homeowners are asking the city for a solution after their basements flooded with sewage for the second time in a year.
Neighbors Jodi Farmer and Sharon Baldwin attended Walton’s City Council meeting Tuesday evening to request the city resolve the sewage backups that have repeatedly swamped their newly constructed homes.
According to Farmer, the neighbors experienced their first sewage backup on June 27, 2022, four years after the construction of their homes. The backup flooded their basements and yards with sewage water and coated their floors with fecal matter.
The floods were triggered by power outages.
LINK nky content partner WCPO reported that the first outage was caused by a storm that “knocked out power to the subdivision’s sub pump.” Farmer said she was informed that a worker then failed to put an emergency backflow on the pump.
Eleven months later, on Memorial Day weekend, Baldwin and Farmer again found their basements filled with sewage. The failure to install the emergency backflow on the sewer pump allowed the sewer to backup into their homes once more when a utility truck backed into a power line and the community lost power.
“I’m 76 years old,” Baldwin said. “This was supposed to be my pre-retirement home. One of the reasons I had this home built was so I wouldn’t have to deal with issues. Now I’ve got bigger issues. I mean, I could have gotten an older home that would have maybe been better.”
Since the flooding, Farmer and Baldwin said they’ve repeatedly attempted to get in contact with city officials, but that communication has been minimal.
Baldwin’s daughter, who lives in the basement of the home and has had her belongings soiled by sewage twice in the last year, was able to get the city to send a cleaning crew and put the residents into a hotel for a week.
Yet, the cleaning crews have left many of Baldwin’s belongings in two storage containers that now sit in her driveway, and their hotel stay ends Friday. The women are now confronted with returning to their sewage-filled homes, and have no idea what to do next.
“They’ve moved stuff around downstairs and they cleaned the ducts and now they’ve disappeared,” Baldwin said.
Baldwin’s daughter added that she and her mother can’t afford to pay to live in a hotel, but that they also can’t risk their health by moving back home until the cleaning crews have finished the job.
“The bacteria is in the paint of the actual house now,” she said. “You cannot let somebody sit in raw sewage over five or six days without some sort of physical problem as a result of that.”
Sewage backup that overflows into homes can release air-borne contaminants that cause cramping, vomiting, fever and severe forms of gastroenteritis over time.
“I’m a type-one diabetic with three autoimmune disorders and asthma, and I’ve had to live with sewage in my home,” Farmer said. “Last time, I went to the emergency room, and I didn’t have a voice for three weeks. This time, I’ve had a horrible cough ever since this flood.”
Farmer told the council that she wants to know why the flooding happened, when it’s going to stop, and that it’s not going to repeat itself.
“I want that in writing so when I go to sell my house and I give this disclosure, it’s in there stating it’s not going to happen again,” Farmer said.
Additionally, Farmer asked City Council that if the flooding happens again, she wants the city to purchase her house at full market value, as she and Baldwin are in fear that the repeated floodings will drastically cut the resale value of their homes.
Despite Farmer and Baldwin’s claims that they’d attempted to contact the city numerous times, city council members said they were largely unaware that these floodings were occurring.
Councilmember Terri Courtney said that communication has “not been [the council’s] strongest suit” recently.
But City attorney Michael Duncan said that Mayor Gabe Brown had gotten Walton’s city insurance involved to reach out to the two homeowners. Farmer and Baldwin deny that this occurred.
Council motioned for a closed session with Matt Bogen of Cardinal Engineering for council members to privately make a decision about next steps for resolving the sewage backups and flooding that plague Farmer and Baldwin’s homes.
“I don’t expect this to be put on the back burner,” Baldwin said. “I want something done, and I want it done quick.”