Local

Sewage seeped into South Park homes; faulty ‘overflow gate' blamed

Trish McDonald stood in the basement of this house that just two weeks ago was filled with water and, worse, sewage, seeping up through the toilet and the floor.

"And I just went, 'oh, god, the whole entire basement must be underwater,'" remembered McDonald.

Another woman who had found temporary shelter there awoke to the calamity.

"She woke up and basically went to get up and her feet, she was in to knees in water," McDonald said.

And then there was the damage to her belongings and those of others in the house.

"This whole basement was full," she said.  "I mean there were pictures here and tools and furniture and antiques."

Nearly a dozen homes and businesses, most of them along South Kenyon Avenue, in South Park were inundated with the stinky mess.

"It's designed, when the system is overwhelmed, to send flows out into the Duwamish River," said Annie Kolb-Nelson, a spokeswoman for King County Wastewater Treatment.

She says an underwater gate that regulates the flows failed.  So the storm and wastewater backed up instead, where people live and work.  The system done in by the more than two inches of rain that fell in less than 48 hours.

"Has the problem been fixed?" she was asked.

"Well, we have our engineers and mechanics on it," Kolb-Nelson replied. "And what they are looking at now is the root cause analysis for why the gate failed. They have enough information they believe at this time to avoid a subsequent occurrence."

A sign near the regulator station indicates it is not unheard of for these overflows to happen.   But most often it all ends up in the Duwamish River.  Even that, according to Kolb-Nelson, is rare.

King County is taking care of the people affected by this overflow, providing shelter, food, and payment for what was lost.