South Ozone Park residents deal with latest sewage spill after decades of disrepair

South Ozone Park residents discarded water-damaged mattresses and other items. Eagle photo by Rainier Harris.

By Rainier Harris 

Special to the Eagle

Sue Chong and her family woke up on Saturday morning to a distinctive, pungent odor: raw sewage.

The stench of human waste was coming from the basement of their home. “It was a nightmare,” said Chong, who has lived in South Ozone Park for 11 years. 

On Nov. 30, murky sludge flooded into her home, and the homes of hundreds of other neighborhood residents. It surged quickly from the basement, rising several inches. With no other option, she and her family strapped plastic bags onto their feet, descended into their basement and used buckets to scoop out the filthy water. They ran up and down the stairs a “hundred times,” Chong said.

The water was rising so quickly, she said, that the family struggled to shovel it out fast enough. The work went on for hours until the water receded, but it rose once again — this time from the bathtub, surging just as quickly as before. 

The Saturday sludge flood was the latest sewer problem in a part of Queens long plagued by wastewater problems. 

“If [the DEP was] maintaining [the sewer], then this could have been avoided,” she said. A Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson told the Eagle that sewers are regularly inspected and that the South Ozone Park sewers were checked last month.

Nevertheless, the system backed up, and Chong said she worried about the long term health impact of the lingering sewage water. 

“What is the odor doing to us?” Chong said. Some residents told the Eagle they experienced  fevers, sore forearms from bucketing water for hours, and vomiting in the aftermath of the sewer backup. 

Residents have also reported having no hot water and say they are unable to take proper showers. Instead, they boil water, from a tea kettle, pour it into a bucket, and then scoop the water from the bucket to clean themselves. City officials had suggested staying away from the sewage water, but many residents said they had to wade through the muck to save their possessions. “We couldn’t stop we [had] to go” Chong said. 

Other residents said the predominantly African-American neighborhood has been ignored by the city, and its infrastructure has been left to decay for decades. 

Cardell Hall, who has lived in South Ozone Park for 50 years, told the Eagle that the city “raised the street” after a sewage backup a few years earlier. The water rose three feet high in his house Saturday and it’s “still coming up,” he said Monday night.

He had been working relentlessly to pump out the water himself, until city officials came to assist him a few days after the initial backup. 

Kumar Bisram, who has lived in South Ozone Park for three  years said the water originally rose to 3 feet in his basement and then subsided. It began to surge again overnight. The sewage  left 80 percent of his basement submerged and he says “no one, nobody, nothing” came to help him cleanup. 

Though the DEP asked several residents to sign up for pumps, several residents who spoke with the Eagle said they never received them. One resident said he had spent $2,000 just for pumps to maintain the water level in his basement and after a few days, the water had not gone down. 

A DEP spokesperson said that the city was providing pumps and that if “homeowners request that their basement be pumped, that has been done.” 

Christian Perez said the water approached his basement ceiling. “Everything is gone downstairs,”said Perez, who has lived in South Ozone Park for 13 years.  The water surged quickly through drains around the house, including the showers and tubs, he said.

Community board district needs statements and 311 complaints from residents show that sewer maintenance has long been a neglected issue in the area. 

The city’s 311 municipal services line recorded 137 sewage complaints from residents in zip code 11436, the same zip code city officials now ask to reduce water usage. The majority of the calls were marked as closed, typically on the same day they were made. The complaints vary from Sewer Backup, Sewer Odor, Street Flooding, Catch Basin Clogged/Flooding, Culvert Blocked/Need Cleaning to other problems. Area residents made 13 complaints to 311 in the month of November alone. 

Nearly every Queens Community Board 12 District Needs Statements since 2008 has cited the inadequate sewers, stating in several introduction clauses that the “sewers are inadequate to serve our community needs.” They have consistently requested for the DEP to inspect sanitary and storm sewers on “specific street segments.”

Residents from other South Jamaica zip codes, 11435 and 11434, reported 235 and 578 sewer complaints this year. Collectively, South Jamaica has reported 1086 sewer complaints this year, 700 of which specifically complained about sewer backups. 

The DEP spokesperson said the city investigates every 311 call. 

The sewers, he said, are “regularly inspected and cleaned” and he  cited “[g]rease/fats and oil improperly disposed of down the drain” as the “number one cause of sewer backups citywide.” 

Nevertheless, he said, the city has yet to determine the cause of the latest Southeast Queens sewage blockage until officials can “get into the sewer and get eyes on it.”

The DEP now advises residents to request whatever services they may need at a service center, established at a nearby hotel, and also to contact their home insurance carriers.

“Basements have been pumped, crews are going into each house to do necessary cleaning,” the DEP spokesperson said. “The Comptroller’s team is on site to work on reimbursement for property damage.”