Lewiston resident Sharon Bland is one of many in the town dealing with flooding on her property.
During town floods earlier this month, a 150-foot-long drainage ditch at Bland’s Lower River Road home filled with water that did not move for hours. She spent a night wading around her yard, trying to remove debris and get the water draining.
The ditch’s drainage pipe is only 12 inches wide, with all the built-up water not getting through fast enough. Hundreds of flies also swarmed around her property, with Bland spending days trying to kill them. She said she also got rashes from spending time in her ditch.
“We feel like we’re abandoned,” Bland said, adding she had talked with more than 300 locals over the years in-person and through social media groups about this. “We feel like we’re paying more and getting less and less help.”
She does not have flood insurance to cover damages, since FEMA designates the land along the Niagara River flowing into Lake Ontario as having a 1% annual chance of flood hazards. A neighbor also had heavy flooding in their backyard.
Bland had tried to get the town to maintain this ditch for the past four years to little success. To help get something done about it, Bland has now started a Change.org petition demanding that Niagara County’s outdated water and sewer infrastructure be improved, calling on the county government and other agencies to prioritize the issue.
The petition can be found at https://tinyurl.com/ycxce5rc.
“As climate change intensifies, the frequency and severity of floods are only expected to rise, yet our infrastructure remains stuck in the past, unable to prevent these catastrophes,” the petition page reads. It also notes how the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the state’s water infrastructure a D+ in 2021, though that increased to a C in 2022.
Some of its recommendations for the county include expanding the sewers to handle larger water volumes, implementing sustainable drainage systems that can naturally absorb excess water, and collaborating with state and federal entities to secure funding improvements.
In the last week of July, Lewiston had 5.12 inches of rain falling over a four-hour period the evening of July 27. Another instance of heavy rain the first weekend of August also saw some parts of the county get as much as 5 inches.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the petition had 66 signatures.
While Bland’s main focus is the Lewiston area, her petition names all of Niagara County because she had seen flood videos and reports from all over the county. If enough people sign onto it and get enough attention, the state government could consider the county for flood disaster funding or the clean water state revolving fund, which provides low-interest loans for sewer infrastructure projects.
“We’re trying every possible way to mitigate the damage,” Bland said. She takes issue with people saying these are once-in-a-lifetime events given there have been many floods in the past few years.
She had also searched for attorneys to help them sue for property damages, but so far none have done so.
The State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services has a form available on its website for homeowners to voluntarily submit storm damage reports from July 28-29 and Aug. 2-3. County Director of Emergency Services Jonathan Schultz said in a release last week that “the first step in attempting to secure any funding is being able to produce data on the impact of the storms. That’s why we need people to fill out the damage forms.”
The state online tool for residents to self-report damage can be reached at Damage Self-Reporting Tool: Homes & Businesses. These reports will help the state’s damage assessment as it potentially looks for federal aid.