BATH

Sewage was spewing from a damaged sewer line into the backyards of residents on Middle Street, so the city fixed it.

But keeping the sewage in meant keeping stormwater out of the new sewer line during large rain events, causing pools of standing water in the backyards of a handful of Middle Street residents. The fix may carry a hefty price tag to solve a problem afflicting a few, but is one the city has committed to address.

Lake Newman, is what Harry Newman calls the pool of water behind his home. He’s lived at 997 Middle St. for about four years and acknowledges, “yeah, I’m PO’d.”

Newman said before the city fixed the sewer line located between the property owners and the railroad tracks, there were holes in the pipe and during a big rain or snow melt, the rain would dissipate through those holes and travel to the sewer treatment plant — which wasn’t good either. The sewage would flow out of the holes in the pipe when it rained and “we’d have poop and stuff floating around.”

The sewer line fix removed the sewage, as was the city’s top priority, but now he has a pool of water in the backyard that at times has been two feet deep.

“So yeah, I’m PO’d … I don’t want to have water in my backyard,” Newman said.

It is an issue that City Manager Bill Giroux briefed the city council on at their last meeting Aug. 6, telling them the cover of a new manhole blew off in June during a storm, that saw three inches of rain fall, from so much water in the system, causing a sewage overflow. There are neighbors who don’t like the idea that there was still a sewer overflow, Giroux told councilors; and several of them now have much more water in their backyard. The city has tried to pump out the water but after a short time, the water level will drop no further.

“We’ll do what we can,” Giroux told the council, working toward a temporary solution. “We want it fixed. Ultimately the council is going to have to make the final decision and the taxpayers may have to as well.”

It started about five or six years ago, said Peter Owen, Bath’s public works director. There was a broken sewer pipe parallel to the railroad tracks on Middle Street north of North Street. The city raised about $2 million through a state revolving loan fund to pay for a series of sewer projects. A study was done showing the problem was that sewage would flow in the pipeline and during a storm, the catch basins up stream flow into that pipeline filling it to capacity so the stormwater and sewer spilled into the yards. When it stopped raining, all that rain water would flow back into the pipeline.

The city had a two-phase project designed to address the problem. The first phase involved fixing the pipe and combining all of the catch basins on Willow Street into one connection into the sewer. A one-way valve was used so at a certain point if the sewer line started to back up, it would shut so the sewage couldn’t get out; but this meant the stormwater couldn’t get in.

The second option was to build a storm water pump station, which would be very expensive to install and maintain. The city held off on the pump station, hopeful the first phase of work completed last fall to the tune of about $1 million, would solve the problem. But neighbors were warned it could mean an increase in water. Owen said there has been flooding in yards but despite a fair amount of rain this summer, there was only the one sewer backup after a storm in June caused a manhole cover to blow off.

“That told us we still have a problem and we’ve concentrated our consultants to see what the next step is,” Owen said. The city is working with the Wright-Pierce engineering firm which will study, do modeling of the pipeline and sophisticated engineering so it’s “not just throwing money at a hole and not fixing a problem.”

At one time the city had no pump stations or waste treatment plant and everything was connected and flowed to the Kennebec River. Bath began wastewater treatment in 1974 and like many other old cities has undertaken many stormwater separation projects. Adding to the problem, the city in the last decade has seen an increase in intensity of rain events.

In conjunction with the work Wright-Pierce is doing, the city was one of only 14 communities to land an Environmental Protection Agency grant providing technical assistance from Tetra Tech to develop a green infrastructure plan for the Willow Street catchment area. Owen said the city is trying to be innovative. It can perhaps capture or push water in a different way to help solve flooding issues.

Owen said it might be next summer at the soonest before anything goes in the ground as part of the fix, and it could be closer to two years by the time the city finds the solution, gets public input, learns the cost, designs the project and finds a way to fund it.

Newman’s neighbor, Dusty Jones, meanwhile, worries about what is lurking in his backyard. When he bought his home a year ago at 995 Middle St., where he lives with his wife and 4-month old daughter, he was unaware of the extent of water and sewer issues; only that it would be fixed. He walked around the bowl that is now his backyard with a reporter Aug. 11, pointing to standing water and goopy mud that when flooded, he fears are washing away soil.

Owen said the city tests for fecal matter and has found no more than what would normally be found in ground water. The word E. coli has been used by some neighbors, a type of fecal composition that Owen stressed the city has not found in its testing.

City officials say neighbors will have the chance to meet with the engineers, possibly in a couple months. Jones said officials “keep referring to some future unplanned event and I understand that things take time and have to go through process, but when they keep referring to unplanned future events, that tells me that nothing’s happening.”

Told it could be two years before something happens, “that’s not OK.” Worried about the health implications he said, “It’s scary to live next to this.”

“I think it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease,” said Newman last week. The rhetoric sounds good but 20 or 30 years seems like a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem, he argued. Responding to the city’s assertion that there is no money for the fix, he said “well that’s not the answer. Get the money.”

Mari Eosco, chairwoman of the city council, lives on Washington Street not far from this neighborhood and has been a conduit for neighbor’s concerns. The city will take into account their ideas for solving the flooding problem, like filling in backyards, but needs to follow an engineer’s advice so as not to do a quick fix that will make a long-term fix more expensive, Eosco said.

“We’ll be having a neighborhood meeting at some point where people can talk bout all these things,” Eosco said, emphasizing the public will be part of the process. “I will continue to listen to their ideas and hear their frustrations and take that to the city and be a thorn in the side of the city so that they’re not forgetting this is an issue.”

That being said, Eosco added, “This is a conversation I have in City Hall multiple times a week.”