Raw sewage keeps flooding these Centreville homes. Now their owners are going to court.

Centreville residents who say their homes have been flooding for decades with stormwater and raw sewage have filed a lawsuit against the city, township and the company that maintains the area’s sewers.

In the northern part of one of Illinois’ poorest cities, flooding is a constant problem for the majority of the residents. Stormwater and raw sewage regularly floods homes, yards and roads causing damage and sometimes trapping residents in their houses.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two Centreville residents, Cornelius Bennett and Earlie Fuse. It names the city of Centreville, Centreville Mayor Marius “Mark” Jackson, Centreville Township, Township Supervisor Curtis McCall Sr., the Commonfields of Cahokia and its superintendent, Dennis Traiteur, as defendants.

Bennett and Fuse are asking the court to stop the defendants from depositing or diverting stormwater onto their properties and to replace some of the village’s pump or lift stations within 30 days. The suit also asks for the installation of new sewer lines where needed as well as a monitor to make sure the changes are being made.

Nicole Nelson of Equity Legal Services, Inc., who filed the lawsuit with partner Kalila Jackson of the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council, said the lawsuit asks only that the issues be fixed and does not seek any monetary damages.

Fuse and Bennett are just two of many residents in Centreville who say decades of flooding have damaged their homes and threatened their health.

According to the lawsuit, Fuse has lived at Piat Place since 1992 and has dealt with flooding since 1993. Since then the basement of his home has been uninhabitable due to damage from the flooding and has cost him thousands.

“If we don’t do nothing, nothing will happen, so we just have to take advantage of every chance that we get,” Fuse, who’s 79, said of the lawsuit. “I’m hoping that it will help the whole community because mostly everybody here is older. You don’t have a lot of young people out in this area. Most of the people here are in their 60’s or older.”

Recurring stormwater has submerged his basement “at least four times” with dark brown water, the suit says. The most recent occurrence was in January 2020. His basement is almost always missing one of its concrete walls, leaving the basement and parts of his home exposed to the elements.

Bennett, who lives in an area of Centreville known as “Ping Pong,” has had similar issues, according to the complaint. He has owned his home since 1983 and started having stormwater flooding and sewage overflows around 1999.

For the last 16 years, he says, he’s had to section off parts of his lawn where the grandchildren that live with him might otherwise play. Raw sewage and stagnant stormwater stands in two long ditches near his driveway.

Further back on his property, sewage seeps from the ground. He puts load of lime on his property to hide the smell, according to the lawsuit.

“Despite the sheer indifference and unwillingness from the parties that are responsible for providing the Plaintiffs and their neighbors these very commodities such as operable and safe sanitary and stormwater systems,” the complaint says,” the plaintiffs are adamant in their desire to remain in their homes.”

Fuse and Bennett’s stories echo those that were documented in a Belleville News-Democrat investigation in February.

Residents in the area said even moderate rainfall causes enough flooding that some are trapped in their homes for days. Stormwater often inundates the city’s aging infrastructure, causing raw sewage to back up into yards, often leaving pools of brown water littered with toilet paper and tampons, they say.

The damage is extensive, expensive to repair and a drain on property values. Many Centreville homes have been abandoned. Those who remain live with the stench that hangs over their neighborhood. They have additional concerns about its affect on their health, they say.

Unanswered complaints

A group of concerned citizens, which calls itself Centreville Citizens for Change, sent a letter to Mayor Jackson in March asking he do something about the flooding. The letter included the signatures of Bennett and Fuse.

“We do not have the money to make these repairs,” the letter says. “Even worse, even if we repaired our homes, as we have sometimes managed to do in the past, we know it will happen again because the unfixed problem is a City and County level problem.”

The Citizens for Change letter asks Jackson what long- and short-term steps were being taken to fix the problems, what state or federal grant money is available that may be used to repair the city’s sewer system or provide relief from the expense of restoring their damaged properties.

Jackson has refused to comment on the flooding after almost a dozens requests for comment from the Belleville News-Democrat, both in person and by phone.

Since then, residents say they haven’t heard anything for the mayor or the city. More recently, a vote to merge Centreville with the nearby city with Alorton to become Alcentra was passed, leaving members of the group more concerned their troubles would continue to go by the wayside.

“Nobody has done anything,” Fuse said. “The mayor has never came out to discuss the problems that we’re having, so we have to try to move forward because at the rate that we’re going now, we’re certainly moving backwards.”

This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 2:47 PM.

Kavahn Mansouri

Belleville News-Democrat

618-239-2507

Kavahn Mansouri is an Investigate Reporter for the NPR Midwest Newsroom based in St. Louis, Missouri, a journalism partner with the Belleville News-Democrat. Support my work with a digital subscription