DELHI TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Lynn Bourgraf’s yard looks bad and smells worse. It’s not her fault.
The flooding that accompanies every heavy rain along Muddy Creek, where Bourgraf and her neighbors live, pushes water into their yards with a heaping helping of stinking sewage besides. The latter is courtesy of a broken, exposed line that Metropolitan Sewer District officials estimate releases 300 million gallons of raw sewage each year.
Bourgraf knows from experience the smell will get even worse come summer.
“It’s gross,” she said Tuesday. “It’s nasty. Nobody wants to live around that or by it. I don’t.”
MSD interim director Diana Christy agrees.
“I mean, this is a public health threat,” she said.
However, it’s a threat without an imminent solution. Replacing and repairing damaged parts of the sewer system will be an expensive project, and MSD will need Hamilton County officials to sign off before it can begin.
According to Christy, MSD hopes to present a new design for the line to county officials soon. If funding is approved, however, repairs likely would not be completed until at least mid-2020.
That’s a long time for Bourgraf to live with the possibility of finding someone else’s soggy toilet paper in her yard.
“I know it’s going to cost a lot of money, and people don’t want to fork up the money, but they’re going to have to come up with something to make it better,” she said.
