Woman, city at odds over water

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Woman, city at odds over water

News-Leader.com - Springfield,MO*

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Wanda Sue Parrot and the city are at a stalemate.

And " stale " couldn't be a more appropriate word. Mold, mildew. Years

and years of it. Stench from sewage seeping into the house every

time there's a heavy rain and the outdated stormwater system carries

it downstream and pops it out manholes and who knows where else.

This is a situation I wrote about in 2004 in the area called the

Sunshine-Holland neighborhood, generally bounded by Cherokee Street,

Washita Street, Robberson Avenue and South Avenue, a " bowl " of a

place when it rains hard.

Some houses on Jefferson Avenue periodically suffer water damage.

Just southeast of the Sunshine Street- Avenue intersection,

it is bounded by massive construction and parking lots that came

years after the houses were built.

Parrott, 72, has lived with severe flooding since moving here in

1988. Many houses in the neighborhood flood, but her house and the

one to her west got it the worst — waters have come up to the middle

of their car doors before, and her former neighbor Jim says

his car floated off once.

Parrott's floors started buckling from the water that flooded her

entire crawlspace, then the tiles in the kitchen and bathroom came

off. During several deluges, water rose to her baseboards. Mold and

mildew and smell were and are everywhere, and she constantly battles

to eradicate it, raking debris after every deluge. When exposed to

raw, damp mold, she says she gets either bronchial asthma or a sinus

infection. She wonders if three tumors she had to have removed,

separately, from the top of her nasal passages were related to mold

spores, but doctors couldn't confirm it.

She has hired contractors for various tries at diverting the waters

and sealing her foundation, installed both electric and manual sump

pumps and done other stopgap measures to the house.

I first wrote about the situation in 2004, and chief stormwater

engineer Todd Wagner said then that he wasn't aware of the severity

of the problem. City crews then implemented some improvements they

thought would help.

Three years later, nothing has changed. There was a major flood on

June 29, and six minor ones throughout the year. With the rains that

came before our brutal ice storm, there was standing water under

Parrott's house, which froze. " I was out of power for 22 days, " she

says, " and my sump pump was totally ravaged. "

For years, Parrott just lived with things as they were. Her elderly

mother, for whom she was caring, didn't want to bother with fixing

things, Parrott says. But when her mother died, Parrott started

asking city workers to come look at the situation and to do

something about it. They tried a few measures, but every time a

heavy rain came, the floods came again. It became a comfortless

cycle: more calls, more city visits and workers scratching heads,

apprehension, flooding. More calls, more city visits and workers

scratching heads, apprehension, flooding.

She then began talking to longtime residents of the area. Some had

lived there with their parents as children and remembered fishing in

a creek there. She looked at a Civil War map of the area and found a

creek, studied years and years of Springfield sewer and growth

history, environmental protection acts such as the Clean Water Act

and other documents. She interviewed a retired sanitary sewer worker

about his experiences in the neighborhood. Then she discovered that

in 1987, a former resident whose house was close to Parrott's had

filed a lawsuit against the city seeking compensation for damages to

personal and real property caused by sewage in their basement. It

was settled out of court.

In 2000, Parrott began filing reports with the city attorney's

office about the situation in the neighborhood and in her house in

particular and sent letters to the city-county health department.

Then her attorney sent the city attorney's office an offer to sell

her house to them at what she thought was fair market value. " There

was no response, " she says. " They acted like I wasn't even alive. "

Yet when she wrote asking about the possibility of an underground

waterway beneath the area, assistant city attorney Rykowski

wrote back: " Our records indicate that an underground system exists

in the Washita/South area. Our staff is currently searching

for drawings or diagrams of this system. "

In 2006, Parrott used her files of documents and wrote a book

chronicling the situation and sent copies to the Environmental

Protection Agency, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and

Attorney General Jay Nixon.

Rykowski says the city is at loggerheads with Parrott and won't go

further with buying Parrott's house because she wants to retain the

right to sue the city for damages in addition to selling her house

to the city. " She wanted to reserve the right to sue me for

something I'm trying to pay for, " Rykowski said.

Parrott itemized the expenses she has incurred fighting the water

over the years, and it totals $130,000. That's what she's asking the

city for above the selling price of her house. " I've used up all my

savings on this, " she says. " I'm living on Social Security only now. "

" It appears there is no determination that the cause of (any

damages) is nothing caused by or in control of the city, " Rykowski

says.

Yet Wagner now says the flooding in the neighborhood is due to a

drainage pipe that is too small to hold the run-off from the

neighborhood, where it runs under the streets to a nearby Conoco

station. To lay a larger pipe where the smaller one is would run

into too much money and into problems working around City Utilities

lines and equipment to the area.

Is it not the city's negligence that an outdated and inadequate

sewer pipe has been allowed to stay in the area for so long?

Wagner says the Public Works Department's remedy for the situation

would be to buy Parrott's house and use the empty lot, and the one

to the west, to make a retention basin. The west one has already

been sold to the city and razed — that neighbor had only lived there

two years and didn't have much of an investment in trying to cope

with the floods.

So here the neighborhood sits, held hostage to a legal disagreement.

No retention basin, no work on the inadequate draining system in the

area. How long are they going to have to live with the flooding

while the legal battle goes on?

Our sewer system is something every taxpayer funds, in the trust

that their property and health will be cared for. Allowing raw

sewage to escape and even pool beneath people's houses is not

protecting their health. Allowing repeated, debilitating decay and

damage to a house is not protecting the taxpayer's property.

Parrott has an attorney, Rick Muenks, working on a lawsuit, but it

has not been filed.

Most people would have given up a long time ago. Parrott says she's

just too committed to let the problems continue without bringing

them to light and some kind of positive outcome. " I wouldn't sell

and leave somebody else with my problems. I may be at this till I

die. But I'll die standing upright, even if they have to bury me

standing. "