Tonawanda tangle: Cleanup at old town landfill drives flood of complaints from city neighbors

From her family’s backyard, they enjoyed viewing movies outdoors and watching deer wander by.

That changed, however, following work to remove thousands of tons of contaminated soil and safely cover the property.

Now, Hoffmann said, heavy rain can leave behind several inches of flooding in her yard.

“I probably get the worst of it,” Hoffmann said in her backyard on a recent afternoon. “My entire yard will be underwater to where it goes to the lip of my garage.”

She’s just one of the neighbors in the City of Tonawanda who say the landfill cleanup has left them all wet.

Homeowners along Hackett Drive and Wadsworth Court have complained to city officials about the soggy situation for several years, sharing photos and videos of flooding in growing frustration.

City officials, in turn, have pressed their town counterparts to take action.

“The runoff has become so extreme that one of the first times I went to visit one of the neighbors, you could canoe across her backyard,” Tonawanda Council Member David Mileham said.

The Army Corps of Engineers said its responsibilities were limited to remediation work at the property.

Town officials say they are working to help the city neighbors by, for example, constructing a berm to divert water away from their yards.

“I’ll put it this way: I don’t feel that what we are doing with the landfill closure project is making the issue worse. It can only be making it better,” Town Engineer Matthew Sutton said.

The town used the 55-acre site, just north of Interstate 290 and west of Military Road, as its landfill from the 1930s to 1989. Uranium and other radioactive materials dating to the Manhattan Project – the World War II-era program to produce an atomic bomb – were dumped at the site without public knowledge.

They weren’t discovered on the landfill property until the…