JAMESTOWN — Parts of the valley are a mess because of storm damage.
In Jamestown, people dealt with flooded neighborhoods and yards looked more like small lakes.
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News Center 7’s Taylor Robertson talked with the homeowners.
We saw a man floating across the water on a kayak and this was not a pond he was floating on - it’s the front of his home.
Gage Wisecup has lived next door to him for the past two years.
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“Our whole septic system is underwater,” Wisecup said. “All the stuff from neighbors and from our house, just piles.”
If the homeowners want to leave their house, they have to walk through it differently, and they are not the only home on this street that is flooded.
“We can’t even get out of the driveway for the kids to go to school,” Wisecup said.
Thankfully, the water did not make it into the first floor of his home, but you could see how high it collected in his crawl space.
“Anytime there’s rain for a couple days in a row, or in the same week, then we get a heavy rain, it automatically comes from the field behind us,” he said.
The neighbor to Wisecup’s right, you can’t even see the grass in her yard. It’s all water.
Both homes sit lower than the 30-acre corn and bean field out back.
Wisecup added drainage and water pipes flow uphill, which he believes is the problem.
“So, there are ditches,” he said. “But since we set lower than everybody, half a mile down the road, there is a crossover pipe that crosses over to be in front of that stream down there. And it is so small and it sets up probably six inches off the ground of where the ditches are, it will not it can’t handle the water.”
Wisecup first reached out to us about this problem in March.
He said he’s tried to ask the county for help but hasn’t gotten any.
We called the Greene County Engineer’s Office to learn what their options are.
They told us they dug the ditches deeper, but the rest of the fix is up to the homeowners - not the county.
“If we sell the house just like the last owner did, this becomes the next persons issue,” Wisecup said. “And we were not told about it from the last owner and so if we didn’t tell somebody, then it comes back on us.”
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