WALTON, Ky. — An elderly Walton homeowner is looking to the city for answers after her basement flooded with sewage for the second time in 10 months.
Sharon Baldwin, 76, shared pictures and videos of the aftermath the latest sewer backup, which happened Memorial Day Weekend.
Some images showed the basement floor saturated with human waste, others showed sewage gushing out an exterior drain pipe and into her backyard, which was turning into a small pond.
"I don't normally play the age card but I'm just frankly too old to have to do this again,"she said. "This is a little more than I bargained for when I moved here."
It's an unfortunate case of deja vu for the grandmother who said she spent four months picking up the pieces of a previous sewage backup. That one happened last summer, she said.
It was the first substantial issue Baldwin experienced since moving into the new construction home in 2017.
"Having to live through this not just once but twice and getting older and, you know, this was supposed to be my retirement dream home and it's become like the nightmare," she said. "I don't feel comfortable being here, but where am I going to go?"
Baldwin said her daughter called the city and they sent a cleaning crew.
Her daughter sleeps in the basement so now many of her belongings are pushed into the one corner of the room that wasn't completely affected. Baldwin's share of damaged belongings are currently stacked inside two storage containers in her driveway.
Baldwin said, unlike the first sewage backup, this crew didn't clean off her items.
"They took things up, put them in big black — looked like body bags — big, black trash bags and put them in (the containers) and I'm thinking, 'Yeah, a lot of that wasn't on the floor but everything was down here,'" she said.
Her daughter was able to convince the city to put them up in a hotel for the past week, but other than that communication has been sparse, Baldwin said.
"There's a lot of stuff they say that I don't understand -- mitigation, subjugation, whatever — nobody's really shown me anything in writing — but 'they don't do build-backs,' so I don't know," Baldwin said. "I don't know, I guess they're leaving this for me to take care of on my dime, and let alone time — energy and mental, financial stress. I don't know how this is going to get resolved and, frankly, I'm overwhelmed by this whole thing."
Baldwin said the city told her both sewer backups were ultimately caused by power outages. The first because a storm knocked out power to the subdivision's sub pump and a worker failed to but an emergency back flow on it and the second because a utility truck backed into a power line, cutting electricity to the community for five hours, Baldwin said.
If it was electrical issue, Baldwin is wondering how the city could fail to have a fail-safe plan or generator in place. She said she's been trying to ask the city, to no avail, and she's not the only one.
"After the first time I was told that there was a fix and it wouldn't happen again," Jodi Farmer, Baldwin's next door neighbor, said. "I'm like, so you're telling me every time it storms, the power goes out, I have to worry about my house flooding? Like that just doesn't seem right to me."
Farmer said her basement filled with sewage the same two times Baldwin's did.
"I called the City of Walton and spoke with the city manager and she said they were going to have meetings about it, that she really couldn't answer why it happened again, that they have no resolve on how it's going to be fixed and basically gave me the mayor's email address and said, 'Write a letter,'" Farmer said.
WCPO reached out to Walton's mayor and water department but did not receive a response by end of day Monday.
A council meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. Tuesday. Baldwin and Farmer said they plan on attending.
"I want to know: Why? How's it going to be fixed? And I want something in writing that says its not going to occur again and if it does occur again I want them to purchase my home for fair market value," Farmer said.
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