Some South Park residents allowed to go home 2 weeks after sewage backup

SEATTLE -- It’s the last kind of plumbing problem you want to have -- sewage inside your house.

A couple of weeks ago, hundreds of gallons of raw sewage flooded some neighbors’ homes in South Park. On Friday, Q13 News took a closer look at some of the damage inside the homes.



“It smelled like the toilet had overflowed,” said Trish McDonald. “It smelled like sewer. The bottom step was completely underwater.”

The South Park neighbor tells us on February 9, she woke up to her friend screaming that water was coming inside.

“She’s like ‘no, stuff is floating!” McDonald said.

According to McDonald, at that point, she and her friend, who was only staying there for the night, grabbed the first things they could find.

“She found a tub she needed to get her dog food out,” McDonald said. “So she put her stuff in the tub and pushed it over to me.”

However, McDonald said in the end, they just couldn’t save everything.

“Her grandmother’s vanities were the first things that I saw at the bottom of the steps,” she said.

So how did this happen?

According to King County Waste Management, the gate that dispenses the dirty waste water failed.

“It’s supposed to discharge the waste water and storm water into the Duwamish River to protect homes, but unfortunately, the gate did not open,” said Annie Kolb-Nelson with King County Waste Management.

Going forward, Kolb-Nelson said they are going to thoroughly test the sewage water system until they figure out why the gate didn’t work in the first place.

McDonald is one of three people back at home. Twenty-seven people in total were left without homes because of the sewage backup. Eleven homes were damaged.

We’re told other neighbors still haven’t been able to return home since that night two weeks ago, though the county has put all of the neighbors up in nearby hotels.

The county tells Q13 News that most of them should be back in their homes sometime next week.

In the meantime, the county will front the bill for the damage that occurred from the sewage backup. They are also still making repairs on its big waste treatment plant near Discovery Park that sent millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound.