Editorial: Sewage troubles for Harmar residents show need for collective action
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There are certain tasks government has to be depended upon to handle. The people can’t pave the roads. They can’t lock up criminals. They can’t just grant people the ability to work as a doctor or get divorced or drive a car.
And they can’t build sewage systems.
In Harmar, some residents dreaded the aftereffects of Hurricane Ida because they knew it was going to mean more than flash floods on the roadways. It would — and did — mean basements flooded by stormwater and raw sewage.
Ruth Gee has lived in Harmar for 52 years. She just had a major backup in her basement — for the 10th time. The same thing happened when the remnants of Hurricane Ivan blew through in 2004. Kim Barr and her parents have spent 10 years dealing with raw sewage ending up in their basement after big storms. They aren’t alone.
But when people showed up at Thursday night’s meeting, supervisors said this is the first they have heard of the problem. Really? No one has brought up over a decade’s worth of homes flooding with what the neighbors flushed away? That seems hard to believe.
Township engineer Matthew Pitsch said the problem is the way stormwater and sanitary systems are knotted together, sometimes connected where they shouldn’t be. When that happens, a huge downpour such as a tropical storm pushes millions of extra gallons of rainwater into the system, which is bad for two reasons. First, the rainwater doesn’t need to be treated like wastewater. Second, when the pipes back up because of the volume, that’s when it ends up in basements and other drains.
Smoke and dye tests can help track where there could be problems, such as downspouts running into a sewer. Once the problems are identified, they can be fixed.
But there has to be more than just telling the people to fix something that might predate the homeowner’s purchase. Because the sewer systems are all connected, what happens on one property affects the next and the next and the next, all down the pipes.
This is one of those problems where people such as Gee can do the right thing, bringing in a plumber to check connections and clogs every year like a responsible owner — but the floods continue because of what is happening a block away.
Problems such as these need more than to be identified. They need a plan of correction that doesn’t depend on springing a giant bill on property owners out of the blue while still safeguarding the ones cleaning up the mess.
And these solutions need to come sooner rather than later. Hurricane Ivan was called a 100-year flood, but in the 17 years since it happened, those once-in-a-century storms seem to be coming more and more often.