Six feet of snow in West Seneca earlier this month was followed by rain and melting snow. Then basements started flooding.
“Thursday night into Friday is when all the water came in,” Stephanie Merner of Sunbriar Drive told The Buffalo News about last week’s deluge at the house she and her husband, Matt, moved into last August.
About 8 inches of floodwater poured into the basement, she said, and ruined many of their belongings.
The cleanup for the Merners could have been worse, several residents told Town Board members at Monday night’s Town Board meeting.
“I have raw sewage in my basement,” a resident from Sunnyside Drive told the board. “That’s unacceptable. It’s wrong. How would you like to sit in your house and smell raw sewage, and you have to clean it?”
Residents who bore the brunt of town flooding live in the West Willowdale Drive neighborhood behind Southgate Plaza, including the Merners, as well as from Sunnyside and Briarhill drives about 2 miles northeast, off Center Road.
Supervisor Gary Dickson said the town will follow up on the complaints.
“Mother Nature has given us so much water and is putting it in a sewer system that was probably not designed for that much water,” Dickson said. “And the sewer system is 50 years or more old. It has holes in it, and it is phenomenally expensive to fix.”
The town is under a consent order from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to address wet weather overflows of the sewer system caused by storm water getting into and overwhelming sewer lines.
Part of the challenge is being addressed by a $16 million project underway to line the old sewer pipes.
Neighbors are losing patience.
“This many people show up from one street, it’s not our individual houses,” Sam Taub, of Southgate Drive, said at the board meeting. “Something’s wrong on the street. Something’s collapsed. It needs to be fixed.”
Several residents have asked why Southgate…
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