Several Albert Park homes flooded after sewer line blockages

Doug Dodd and his wife were watching the fourth quarter of the Thursday night Roughriders game when they noticed something didn’t smell right.

“I thought I could smell sewage,” Dodd said in front of his Albert Park home. “I came outside and couldn’t smell anything and about the same time my wife had noticed it. Then I went downstairs and it was hard not to notice.”

When he went downstairs he saw that almost his entire basement had been flooded with sewer water. At its deepest, he says the sewage rose six inches off the ground.

Dodd says he called the city and was told there were two sewer blockages in the area. He says he believes the blockages were cleared sometime overnight and the water did recede, but the damage was done.

Global News spoke to other residents who live on O’Brien Bay whose basements also required extensive cleanup. The same goes for a number of residents a block away on Wood Crescent, one of whom said he experienced extensive flooding despite his house having a backwater valve.

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Dodd says that aside from his initial phone calls, he didn’t receive much more information about the problem form the city.

“It’s not what they said, it was kind of how they said it: itemize everything, send a detailed letter in with pictures, attention our legal department, and they will decide in the next 90 days if you have a viable claim or not. They kind of insinuated that we better have our insurance in place.”

In a statement to Global News on Sunday, the City of Regina said it “has been made aware of 11 instances that came through Service Regina” and would provide an update on Tuesday.

For now, Dodd is focusing on the positives — he says cleanup crews have been excellent.

“They’ve been here ’til 8 o’clock at night and they were back here at 8 in the morning, so I can’t fault them one little bit. They’ve done an excellent job.”