By Hedy Korbee
It’s bad enough having your basement flooded with stormwater and raw sewage once — but twice? In less than a month?
That’s exactly what many residents of Birch Cliff and other parts of southwest Scarborough are dealing with following Friday’s heavy rainfall.
For Pete Dickens, who lives on Kalmar Avenue, it’s becoming overwhelming and he’s thinking of leaving Birch Cliff and moving to another part of the city.
Pete Dickens
“We have a couple of neighbours and we’re all trying to decide is this part of the city so neglected that we just need to move out? We can’t deal with it any more.”
Dickens recently spent $14,000 on a basement renovation that consisted of adding a new bathroom and laying carpet so that his one-year old son could play downstairs.
On July 15th, when 88 millimetres of rain fell in a two-hour period, Dickens’ basement flooded with four inches of stormwater and sewer water. Like many homeowners he cleaned up, decontaminated, threw away possessions, ripped out drywall, and filed an insurance claim.
The estimated cost of the rebuild and replacement of his belongings is $25,000.
On Friday as the rain started to fall Dickens went to check the basement drains and, sure enough, sewage started pouring back into his basement. He started frantically bailing and left his baby crying in the crib:
Dickens' basement shower drain
“I wouldn’t go near him because I was bailing and the water was very dark and it stunk and I didn’t want to go anywhere near him.”
What bothers Dickens, along with many of the flooding victims, is that there is no official explanation for why this is happening.
Toronto Water described the July 15th downpour as a “1 in 100-year storm”, which is a simplified way of saying that statistically there is a 1% chance of this happening during any given year.
Now, less than one month later, it’s happened again and Dickens is frustrated.
“No one can actually say if it’s because the sewer was at
Pete Dickens
capacity, because of the trap or because of the downspout. We can only speculate, so now we have to spend the money to try to cover every angle.”
Today, workers were clamouring all over Dickens’ property and he’s spending another $6,000 on repairs when he isn’t sure of the problem.
After the July flood, city workers told Dickens’ to install a backflow valve in the basement, but in order to do that he has to remove the trap. That’s a U-shaped dip in the main drain from his house to the sewer that serves the dual purpose of draining water to the sewer and preventing sewer gas from entering the house.
Workers removing the trap
As it turns out, the trap was filled with rubble and rock that was pushed into his drain from the city sewer system during the July flood.
He’s also disconnected his downspout, even though he had an exemption from the city because the downspout was next to the back door on his driveway.
Today, workers were ripping out all of his eavestroughs and replacing them so water drains into the front and back yards.
What bothers Dickens is that there’s still no guarantee it won’t happen again:
“What we believe is that the sewer system is completely inadequate to deal with the heavy rains and we’ve done everything we could, spending $6,000, and we’re told it’s not even foolproof what we’ve done. If the sewer overwhelms with a certain amount of pressure, the backflow valves sometimes fail.”
Although the city of Toronto has a rebate program to subsidize the cost of backflow valves, Dickens is frustrated that the rebate programs for disconnecting downspouts and removing traps were recently cancelled.
“I don’t know why they would take away the rebates because it’s not like the problem is fixed. if anything it’s more of
Dickens disconnected the downspout, despite exemption
an issue now.” They should reinstate those rebates to cover 100%,” Dickens says.
Dickens says the entire experience has left him not so much angry, but frustrated and fearful. Like many people in Birch Cliff, he says he now gets anxious when it rains. He and his wife don’t go out. He’s cancelled his vacation until all of the work is done. Dickens biggest fear, however, is contamination and the impact it might have on a one-year old little boy.
