Infrastructure Nine months later, drainage difficulties continue for east side resident

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John Pollack
Telegraph-Journal

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SAINT JOHN - Andrew Shipley was watching his daughter, Aaliyah, 2, run around in his backyard in late September when he got a scare that would make any parent's heart stop.

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Peter Walsh/Telegraph-Journal

Andrew Shipley is worried this backyard sinkhole that his two-year-old daughter fell into will get bigger. He believes the sinkhole is the result of a drainage problem he’s trying to get the city to fix.

"I couldn't believe it when I saw it," he said.

Aaliyah had fallen into a sinkhole.

Luckily she was OK, but the incident only made an ongoing struggle with the city more frustrating for Shipley. He is trying to get the city to fix a drainage problem, which Shipley believes led to the sinkhole.

Since March he has been trying to get the city to repair what is believed to be a drainage pipe separation, which causes flooding on parts of his property in Lakewood Heights on the east side. Dozens of phone calls and multiple visits by city workers over the summer didn't solve the problem, although Shipley said the city promised the issue would be resolved by July.

Then in early September the tail end of hurricane Hanna brought heavy rainfall, softening the ground where Aaliyah fell.

After the close call, Shipley is worried about his children's safety.

"I don't know if there's another soft spot," he said.

Shipley is angry at the city that most of his property isn't safe for his children.

His children, he said, "should be able to go anywhere in my yard. It shouldn't be an issue."

But that issue has only worsened because the sinkhole has gotten wider and deeper.

"It's to the point now that you can take a stick and you can push it down through the ground like four feet," Shipley said. "That's all I tried, to push it down."

He is worried about the sinkhole's being close to his foundation.

"It could get to the point where I have a leak in my basement," he said.

Shipley moved into his house, which is at the bottom of a hill on Huxtable Street, in December 2006. He first called the city in March 2008 about water running down from the hill flooding the three-metre low point on his lot. He wanted to resolve the problem so he could fill in the mini valley to have a bigger, flatter green lawn for his youngsters to play on.

Nine months later, the problem hasn't been resolved.

"It makes me very, very upset, like mad," Shipley said. "It's my property and I want to do things with it and I'm not able to."

The water leaves the ditch and goes into a drainage pipe across the street from Shipley's house. Then the pipe runs under the street and under his lawn, but leaks before it hits another property.

On one of the city's at least seven visits that Shipley knows of, workers cleaned dirt out of the pipe.

"(They) said they were going to come back to stick a camera in it," Shipley said. "They never have."

But Nancy Moar, a spokeswoman for the city, says that is not for a lack of trying that problem has not been resolved.

"They're flushing the pipe again and they'll be putting the camera through when they can," she said, adding that weather and frozen ground can delay procedures such as this. Once the pipe can be videotaped, city crews can better address the problem.

After a visit by crews this month, Moar said, "right now it's working, the water is flowing all right."

But the repairs in general are difficult.

"The drainage system in the subdivision has been there for 30 years, so it's not something that can be easily resolved," she said, later adding that working on the drainage system could potentially affect the entire subdivision.

As for the July completion promise, Moar said the city is looking into it.

"There's no documentation right now where that was written as part of a plan," she said.

Shipley said he was told the city will get to it next summer, but that isn't soon enough for him. He wanted to finish his lawn this summer and is now faced with a predicament.

"If I dug this up and blocked it off to keep my basement from getting saturated with water ... it's going to cause problems for my neighbours," he said, because it would divert the water onto their properties.

Shipley has begun to fill in the hole a bit, something he has alerted the city about.

"I'm filling it in as much as I possibly can," he said.

Although he doesn't intend to take his repairs to the point that it passes the problem onto his neighbours, he feels he has to do something.

"The water's going to have nowhere to go but in my basement," he said. "There's no reason why I should have the drainage into my yard."