The Front Porch: Sewage in basements plagues neighborhood

When the sewage came to my basement, I shut the door, ran up two flights of steps and read a book. And thought about maybe selling the house.

My boyfriend built a contraption out of duct tape, a plastic flowerbed, a length of clear plastic and an orange juice container that he hoped would divert the sewage into a bucket. I didn’t ask what he was going to do with the bucket.

When the sewage came to our neighbor Jennifer Hansen’s basement, she got on the phone and called the city. She kept calling and calling.

She created a petition and surveyed the neighborhood. She kept calling.

“She has become a student of sewage,” said Mike Yake, a senior engineer with Spokane’s Wastewater Management Department, the man who calls her back.

The student has a complicated subject.

Much of the South Hill is connected to combined sewer lines, meaning the pipes carry both sewage and storm water. It was a decision made decades ago, Yake said, for reasons he doesn’t quite understand.

But he figures the combined lines weren’t a problem then, because homes didn’t have showers or washing machines in their basements or any other reasons to install plumbing down there.

These days, it’s a problem, particularly in older areas lower on the South Hill, like where Hansen’s family and my family live in the South Perry area of the East Central neighborhood, where there aren’t other systems in place to compensate.

During heavy rain or a big snow melt, the combined lines become overloaded with storm water. As Yake phrased it, the sewer relieves itself into our basements.

It was an especially bad problem for Jennifer and her husband, Jesse, who bought their house on East 10th Avenue in July 2005. In August, they smelled something horrible. They weren’t living in the house yet, so they didn’t notice until after a couple of days of heavy rain that “the whole basement was filled with raw sewage.”

A plumber told her the problem was a clogged city line. The city told her the problem was with the Hansens’ side sewer line, which connects the house to the city works.

Jennifer just knew she never wanted to have raw sewage in her basement again. She and her husband paid to replace their side sewer line. They paid to have the basement cleaned and repainted and a sewage-soaked wall torn down.

The Hansens moved in and until Dec. 23, 2005, suffered no more of the South Hill’s sewage. But on that day, a massive snow melt caused another flood in their basement – and, although they didn’t know it yet, in the basements of many of their neighbors.

This time, the Hansens’ loss was personal. Two of Jennifer’s immediate family members, including her brother, had recently died, and she was storing inherited items in her freshly painted, recently scrubbed basement.

“It was family heirlooms; it was my brother’s stuff that smelled like him; it was stuff that absolutely couldn’t be replaced,” she said. “It was baby stuff. Christmas presents.”

She learned that a neighbor two houses down had basement sewage, too.

“That’s when it clicked that it wasn’t a one-in-a-million thing, that this was a problem with the city.”

The South Perry district is the home of Grant Elementary School, The Shop coffeehouse and the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery. As Spokane goes, it’s pretty diverse in terms of race and income.

Jennifer and her husband liked that diversity and the “community feel,” as well as the neighborhood’s old houses, old trees and affordability. But she thinks that affordability has had something to do with all that sewage in the basement.

“I felt like if this had been an affluent area, this problem would have been solved years and years ago,” she said.

And when she went door to door on our block and one block down the hill, asking if our neighbors had similar problems, nearly everyone reported they did. Many neighbors were surprised, she said, to learn that they weren’t the only ones.

At one duplex, rented by two families with young kids, the sewage came up through a bathtub.

“I just felt it was so wrong,” Jennifer said. “It seemed like such an injustice.”

In fact, it might be inequity that ends up helping us, Yake said. Our neighborhood appears to have a “level of service” that is “below normal,” and if Yake’s analysis shows that’s true – and that a proposed change wouldn’t harm people downstream – then our service can be improved.

Yake emphasized the uniqueness of the circumstances in our neighborhood that might allow for that: There just happen to be two pipes running under Perry Street instead of one, and our homes could be connected to the one that’s not overloaded. That could start in late summer, Yake said.

Yake is cautious. And he warns that even after the switch, floods will happen if it rains enough.

Hansen is optimistic.

“It’s amazing to think that one person really can make a difference,” she said.

Still, she keeps calling the city. Every week.

As for me, I’ll make sure my boyfriend knows where that bucket is.