WEST LEBANON — When Mack Avenue resident Georgia Tuttle returned home from a trip last year, she found her downstairs shower was nearly overflowing with raw sewage due to a backup while she was away.
She spent days cleaning up the mess.
“It was pretty upsetting,” Tuttle, a former Lebanon mayor, told a reporter on Wednesday.
Every three to four months, the Lebanon Public Works Department does a routine blowout procedure where they use high-pressure hoses to clear out sewer lines so that water can flow freely.
But Tuttle — who drove seven hours from Maine to give testimony at Wednesday’s Lebanon City Council meeting — said that this regular process has had the effect of pushing sewage into Mack Avenue homes, with three other neighbors sharing a similar sentiment.
The specific intention of the procedure is to prevent backups into homes from clogs in the pipes by relieving them with pressure hoses, Assistant Director of Public Works Rick Brown said Thursday by phone. It has apparently had the opposite effect.
“Every time I see a big truck on the street, I know that the City of Lebanon is going to bring sewage into my home,” resident Kevin Golden said in a public comment during Wednesday’s meeting.
Golden described not only the presence of water in his home at times, but also sewer gas, which he said caused a “nauseating garlic smell” that made his cats ill.
“Put yourselves in our positions. Is that the way you guys want to live?” resident Donald Hemenway, a neighbor who has experienced the problem, asked the council during the meeting.
The underground clay pipe connected to Mack Avenue, a dead-end residential lane off Main Street in West Lebanon, serves 20 homes and connects to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
Brown said he was only made aware of one backup issue over the past six years on Mack Avenue and that was caused by a root ball clogging the pipes. Following protocol, public works assessed the situation and submitted a report to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.
Tuttle, outside Wednesday’s meeting, said she called Public Works regarding the overflow into her shower. She said someone whose name she couldn’t recall visited her home and quickly deemed it a personal plumbing issue despite her explaining that she had been out of town for weeks.
Residents are asking for a solution, but more specifically, some have called on the council to rescind a recent transfer of up to $80,000 toward the Mechanic Street Sidewalk project that was previously authorized for a Mack Avenue project that never came to fruition.
“I’m not against the sidewalk, but I am concerned about my family’s health and my neighbors,” said Hemenway.
City Manager Andrew Hosmer clarified during the meeting that the city pushed off the Mack Avenue project due to the estimated multimillion dollar cost of upgrading the street’s infrastructure.
“In narrowing down the list of priorities that the city was going to do, even though the situation was serious, the city did not go forward with the project,” said Hosmer.
The project is listed on the city website as initiated, but having not reached a design phase.
Tuttle, who was on the council from 2009 to 2018, said Mack Avenue was on the list for upgrades during her tenure, and that plumbing has been problematic “since the turn of the century.”
She added that while there hasn’t been enough funding readily available for such a project, there wasn’t enough for Mechanic Street either until the council voted to pull money from other areas.
“You’ve left exactly $0 for our urgently needed project of repairs,” Tuttle said in her comment.
Hemenway also spoke out against transferring the Mack Avenue funds during an April 15 City Council hearing to decide whether to approve supplemental funding for a phase of the sidewalk project. The council voted 6-2 in favor of the transfer.
Part of the ongoing discussion involves possibly revisiting it as a capital project, which would call for a cost evaluation, presentation to the board, vote to appropriate the funds and bidding it out, all before the work can begin, said Hosmer. It’s not a quick fix.
A less expensive option, such as a pump station, may also be considered, but the city first needs to be certain that it would resolve the problem, said Hosmer.
The council collected email addresses of those impacted and urged residents to report backup situations to the Public Works Department.
“We are going to be moving forward with trying to identify some of these core potential causes,” Mayor Douglas Whittlesey said in response to the comments.
The most recent blowout of the system was in April, said Brown, meaning the next one is anticipated for this summer. The Department of Public Works plans to notify residents and take a closer look at what happens during the process to determine if it needs to be conducted differently moving forward.
