Residents fed up with sewage
Residents in the Christchurch suburb of Bromley say they are tired of sewage backwash flooding their gardens and causing bathroom trouble.
Drains have overflowed several times in recent weeks, spewing sewage onto a row of properties in Cuthberts Rd.
Residents believe vacuum sewer pumps installed on the street several months ago are not doing their job, but the Christchurch City Council has blamed high groundwater levels from last month’s heavy rain.
Council-owned maintenance company City Care has visited the site twice to try remedy the problem.
Elderly Cuthberts Rd resident Val, who did not want her surname published, said the problem was ‘‘terrible’’.
She had foul-smelling water running through her property this week, the toilet backed up and overflowed if not given time to drain away between uses, and using the shower or washing machine caused trouble, she said.
Val said workers sometimes came and made adjustments to the street system. That had helped, but each time the problem recurred.
When it happened again on Monday and she rang the council, she was given a reference number but no workers came until Tuesday.
‘‘With the earthquakes and everything and then the midges and now all this, we feel like we are going through the whole lot again. We are being treated like pigs. We don’t know what the heck to to.’’
Her son David said sometimes his mother ended up in tears over the problem. They had not had sewer problems before the system went in, he said. This week, they had other people’s used toilet paper strewn on their property and their pipes would not drain.
‘‘We’re fed up with it. Some days you can’t even get up and use the toilet, we have to use the portapotty in the caravan,’’ he said. ‘‘I feel like, why should you pay rates when you have to put up with this?’’
Council head of three waters and water John Mackie acknowledged the drains had not worked well after the recent rain.
The new vacuum tanks had been doing a good job, but the saturated ground meant water had been constantly filling the underground vacuum tanks, he said. It meant groundwater was entering the tanks directly and was getting into the system through broken pipes on private properties, he said.
‘‘As the water table drops, the groundwater infiltration into the tanks will diminish.’’
Mackie said that when called out by residents, City Care staff had drained the tank and cleaned up properties.
The vacuum pump on the street was among those fitted by contractors on Christchurch streets because ground level changes from the earthquakes made gravitypowered systems less effective.