Residents express anxiety, anger over Grande Avenue flooding

CEDAR RAPIDS - City staffers met Thursday with about 20 residents of the Grande Avenue neighborhood in southeast Cedar Rapids to talk about how to stop stormwater and sewer backups that have plagued homes there for years.

Residents at the meeting expressed anger and anxiety over the decades-long issue. Backups in their basements and flooding along their streets have required them to repeatedly replace furnaces, appliances and, in some cases, vehicles, they said.

The most recent flooding came after heavy rains in April.

'If this happens again, I'm pretty much ready to call it a day,” said Stephen Canty, who has lived near 18th Street and Grande Avenue SE for more than 12 years. 'I can't afford to keep replacing. I'm done. I'm serious. I'm just done.”

Sandy Pumphrey, the city's stormwater sewer engineer, said the residents 'are correct that we have been aware of this issue for a while. This is not a surprise to us. We are aggressively trying to figure out how to tackle the problem.”

Aging and deteriorating sanitary sewer lines, both public and private, have contributed to the problem. Water seeps into the deteriorating lines, adding to the load.

In addition, some private sewer lines in homes built in the mid-1900s connect to the city's lines. That's no longer allowed, but many of those homes are upstream of Grande Avenue and add to the water coming down Grande and surrounding streets.

'There's a lot of stuff going on upstream of you,” said Dave Wallace, the city's sewer utility engineering manager. 'We know it's not your neighborhood, but there's a lot of homes upstream of you that are that vintage.”

The public works department employees said city staffers are working on a citywide program to address backups and stormwater flooding.

'Our challenge is to find something that's acceptable for most - that they can support, that we can support, that the ratepayers can support,” Wallace said. 'That is why it's taken a while to develop a solid program.”

Any citywide plan would require City Council approval, adding to the timeline, the two engineers said.

Wallace and Pumphrey asked residents to consider buying and installing backwater valves, which prevent water and sewer backup into basements. Cedar Rapids offers an $800 reimbursement to residents to help offset the cost, which averages $1,500, Pumphrey said.

'We're recommending this as a stopgap measure like a small insurance policy to fight that in the meantime,” Pumphrey said. 'We're not saying it's going to solve all the issues, but we have heard from a number of people that say it has worked just fine.”

Canty and others, though, expressed doubts and concerns about the cost.

'You're asking already stressed-out, financially stressed-out, homeowners to invest $1,500 to $3,000 on something that may not work,” Canty said.

Tanya Malloy said Meadowbook Drive, where she lives, 'turns into a raging river when it rains,” adding her home has flooded twice in the last three years.

Wallace, Pumphrey and the residents also discussed whether to pursue a communication campaign to tell upstream neighbors about the problems caused by private connections to the sewer system.

Speaking with those residents, though, can take time, especially given the touchy nature of entering private property, Pumphrey said.

'Those homes, in order to solve that problem, we need to enter those homes, and we need to make that change,” he said. 'There are some legal problems with that.”

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