CommunityCouncilTop Story

Don’t let your trap dry out

By Chris Lewis | Sept. 3, 2020

Some Paradise residents say they are occasionally getting a hum of something not so pleasant.

Chelsie McGrath is a relatively new resident of Paradise, having only moved to the area back in April. She said the experience has been a fairly positive one thus far – except when it rains. During a recent heavy rainfall, McGrath said, her basement began to fill up with a foul odour that smelled like sewage. At first, she believed it to be an issue isolated to her own home and assumed there was some kind of work that would need to be done. However, she soon discovered that other homeowners in the area were finding the hum too.

“This was the first time that we’ve had any really heavy rain since we moved in in April, so that was the first we’d noticed it,” she said.

Discovery Crescent, Imogene Crescent, Westport Drive, and a number of other streets within the Elizabeth Park and Thomas Estates subdivisions were all on the list of streets with residents who claimed to smell the sewage during rainy weather, McGrath said.

When she took her concerns to the Town of Paradise, McGrath said, she was told the smell would go away once the rain had passed.

“Underneath our basement steps there’s a square cut-out where some pipes come up from underneath the crawl space. They recommended we fill in that square with concrete, because that’s where the smell was likely coming up from,” McGrath said. “But, also, I was told by a health inspector to not do that because if we need access to the pipes, that little square would need to be open.”

McGrath said the smell was mainly in the basement, and near the front entrance to her home. However, if the crawl space is left open, then those upstairs can also easily smell it.

“There were plenty of comments on (my) post about it, once I put it out there. It was all dispersed over Paradise, it seemed,” she said.

The Shoreline contacted the Town, but was told there has not been any influx of such calls and that these kinds of issues can arise from dry traps underneath houses. Residents should maintain the traps and keep them from drying out in order to avoid being faced with sewerage-related smells advised a town official.

Still, McGrath is concerned about the potential for this to become an ongoing issue.

“They said to just not go down there too much and try not to breathe it in,” she said. “It did go away like they said, so that was good, but it’s still concerning.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *