Cranberry residents were mopping up again after a reoccurring problem with City of Powell River’s storm sewers soaked their basements.
Earlier this month, Powell River received record snowfall accumulations, in some places measuring as much as 70 centimetres in the span of only a few days.
As the snow melted, residents living near the edge of Cranberry Lake, on Marlatt Avenue and Hatfield Place, had to contend with storm drain overflow causing sewer systems to back up and basements to flood.
Marlatt resident David St Cyr said he and his neighbours live at the bottom of the hill and the water flows with gravity to the lowest point of the system.
“It all winds up at the bottom of the hill and it literally blows the manhole cover off,” said St Cyr.
City director of infrastructure Tor Birtig said while the problem has been reoccurring, its explanation is not as simple as the water in the pipes flowing toward the lake.
“We can’t pinpoint exactly when it occurs,” said Birtig. “During that record rainfall last fall, we had no issues.”
Neighbours report that when the backups happen it results in city sewer water come up through basement floors and laundry drains.
“It’s coming right up the laundry room sink and pouring out at like 20 psi,” said St Cyr. “We’ve got sewage in the whole basement.”
Birtig said when there is no capacity left in the city’s sewer pipes, it makes home sewers back up and not drain properly.
“Whatever they are flushing backs up, and whatever is in their sub-floor comes up,” he said. “It’s not as if our sewer system is pushing up into their homes.”
St Cyr, who has been living at the corner of Marlatt and Hatfield for the past four years, said he believes the problem has been reoccurring for at least the last 10 years and the neighbourhood is fed up. Solving the problem does not seem like a priority for city hall, he said.
DJ Fourchalk lives behind St Cyr and said that during the height of the recent snow melt, the pressure in the pipes was so great that water was squirting out from the top of the steel utility hole cover in his driveway. Flowing toward his house, water pooled at his front door.
Fourchalk, whose family relocated from Calgary in November, has had recurring problems with flooding at his new home, something he claimed was not disclosed when he bought the property.
“We chose to live on a lake and there’s going to be some negative things about that, but there’s no way we should have to worry about our three sump pumps going full-time and not sleeping at night,” said Fourchalk.
He added that he had to block part of his driveway to divert the water into a nearby street-level storm catch basin that drains into Cranberry Lake.
Birtig said the city is looking at flow data in the pipes in order to determine the cause of the problem and it has a sewer-line twinning project in 2017’s budget that will help handle the volume of water the system is processing.
In the meantime, city engineers have gone out to vacuum up the water system in Cranberry as a temporary relief measure when the problem strikes.
“It’s not as if we are not addressing it,” said Birtig. “As soon as we were able to pump it down, that went away.”
