ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (WFTS) — It's not how anyone wants to wake up to a steady flow of raw sewage moving through their yards.
But that's exactly what happened in Francesca Piccion's Pinellas County neighborhood Wednesday morning.
"It's incredibly frustrating, you know. It affects our houses and the environment around here, and there's kids and pets that live here. We like to be outside, so it's very frustrating," she said.
The neighbors tell me this isn't the first time it's happened. Piccion and her husband moved to the neighborhood in 2020.
"This is the third time. It happened in 2021, again in 2022, and then now," she added.
They say each year, the house most impacted moves one door down. This year, the bulk of the flow rushed onto Barry Medlock's property.
"I was at work when I got the phone call from my neighbor saying we have the sewage again. He says, it's your yard this time, not mine," Medlock said.
He says he doesn't know what he's going to do next.
"It is in the garage, but the house is up to about two three feet, so it shouldn't be getting in the house, but the house smells. So we got fans in the house trying to keep the smell down. But what I'm going to do tonight as far as sleeping, I can turn the air on but I'm more worried about the dog, because her dogs got sick from two, three months after we thought it was done; they got sick from it. So now I have to watch my dog to keep it from getting sick," Medlock said.
Now the Piccion's are worried that they could be next.
"If we're going with how things are working, our house could be, you know, the next affected one. So it's a scary thought to have," she said.
Plus, there's the environmental and health concerns.
"They say that they sprayed for something to, you know, mediate the the sewage in the in the ground, but, you know, there's nothing. How do we really know how well that does? And you know, we don't, there aren't like soil samples taken or anything like that. So, yeah, it's, awful to deal with, and it smells. I know everyone can smell it, so it's not pleasant. And I mean, it will, you know, affect, it'll end up affecting our street for the next month because of how long the process takes for them to do, to repair it," Piccion said.
Pinellas County is working to fix the issue.
Barbra Hernandez, the Communication Director for Pinellas County, says they are working on a temporary fix and a long-term fix.
"Our crews are out here working actively to remove the sewage and notifying the residents of the circumstance what is happening, providing them all of the necessary support they need. As far as the actual activities near the properties, we're providing sandbags to the residents to make sure that we can contain that flow, and also working on cleanup activities to remove any remainder, any remaining sewage from the front yards," she said.
Pump trucks will remove all of the wastewater spilling into the neighborhood. Then, the crews will break into the concrete to get to the pipe. The county doesn't know what caused the spill but hopes to find out once the crews can open the pipe.
As for the long-term fix, Hernandez says that it will come later.
"Our utilities department is actually working on a capital project to address the entire pipe for the full road. It's about three quarters of a mile. It is a larger project, and they anticipate being able to get moving on that project very quickly this year," she added.
That project can't come soon enough for the people who feel the county has done little to fix the situation.
"I just hope that you know they take it seriously. I think that's, like, the most frustrating part is the initial response is just a bunch of people just assessing, and not really, you know, acting. And so it just the optics aren't great, because you just have a lot of people just kind of standing around. But, you know, this is an, you know, an environmental issue, and it's a hazard. It's sewer water. And so I feel like there should be a better, you know, more of an emergency response in these types of situations," said Piccion.
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