Flooding issues affecting houses in Flora

FLORA — Several homeowners in an area just four blocks north downtown have experienced drainage and sewage backup issues they say is being impacted by aging city infrastructure.

Shane Saxton, who grew up on Estes Street and purchased his family home from his father to use as a rental property, said he has problems with standing water and sewage in his yard nearly every time it rains.

“It’s driving me crazy,” Saxton said. “We’ve been dealing with it for years. My dad dealt with it for years before I bought the home from him, and I’ve been dealing with it for five years since. And it isn’t just me. Hardly anyone in this area can flush their toilets, wash clothes or take a shower when we have a decent rain without getting sewage inside their house.”

Lisa Davis said she’s had similar problems since she purchased her home on the corner of Estes and Sheppard Street last year. She said a ditch in her back yard that runs along Kearney Park Road is clogged to the point that she has standing water in her yard each time it rains.

“When it rains too hard or for too long, I’ve had issues in my master bathroom not being able to flush that toilet and I’ve had water leaking out from the bottom of the toilet,” she said.

Like Saxton and Davis, another area resident Winston White purchased a house with the hopes that the situation would get better. Instead, he said it’s become nearly untenable.

When White purchased the house last year, he said the previous owner did not disclose that there had been a problem with sewage backing up in the house.

“I thought I had negotiated a sweet deal to get that property,” said White, who owns five other homes in the town. “Now I know why — there’s sewage issues that are out of the control of the landowner.”

While he was renovating his new property, White said he had a mix of sewage and rainwater runoff in his bathtub, toilet and sinks. He wound up hiring a plumber and paid out of pocket to install a back-flow preventer to keep the water and waste out of his house.

While several people interviewed for this story said they’ve had issues, it’s Saxton that has gone public with his frustration. He called television stations and posted to Facebook about the problem, including 11 photos and one video of the standing water in both the front and back of his property.

The video shows the water coming into his yard from a manhole, the top of which is obscured by the standing water.

“That infrastructure in that area has been in the ground since before I was born,” Mayor Les Childress said. “There’s really nothing we can do about it without raising taxes on every business and resident in the town. The issues those homeowners are having should have been disclosed in their closing when they bought the homes. I’m trying to be as straightforward as I can. I wish I could fix all these problems as mayor, but I can’t.”

Childress said the town did hire a contractor in early June to send a camera into the sewer pipe that services the homes on Estes Street to assess what blockage existed. Childress said the camera found some blockage that the town removed by “snaking” the pipe from manhole to manhole to clean it out, but that it also found a tree root that had grown through the pipe.

The mayor added that he didn’t know how much it would cost to dig up and replace the pipe, but said whatever the cost, the town was unlikely to be able to afford it without passing some kind of bond and raising taxes to pay for it.

Compounding the problem is the nearby sewage lagoon on the other side of Kearney Park Road, which accepts waste from many of the town’s homes and businesses. Because that area is near the end of the line that leads to that lagoon, their property is the first place wastewater goes if the capacity of the aging infrastructure is exceeded.

“Look — if I win the lottery tomorrow, I promise I’ll fix this problem,” Childress said. “I’m certainly sympathetic to those residents dealing with the issue, and we’ve offered to put back flow preventers in for some homes. But there’s not much the town can do, because the lagoon is right there on the other side of the railroad tracks, and the water from there has to drain just like the water on their side of the tracks has to drain. There’s nowhere for the water to go.”

The third-term mayor added that he’s open to listening to solutions to the problem, but that he planned to continue to focus on the needs of the entire town, not just that area.

Saxton said he has little faith left in the town’s ability to address the issue.

“At the end of the day, nothing is likely to happen,” he said. “They ran that camera down there hoping and praying they weren’t going to find anything that was going to cost a lot to fix. Now that they have, they say it’s too expensive and we’re basically on our own.”