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Damaged floors and and sheetrock have been removed from Ida Millican’s home in the 2200 block of 45th Street. Millican’s home was severely damaged by sewage discharged in mid-July and she has been living in a motel while repairs are made to her home.
Ida Millican hopes to be home for Christmas. What she’ll find inside that home when she moves back in is still unknown.
Millican has been out of her home in the 2220 block of 45th Street since mid-July, when her sewer line discharged raw sewage throughout her home. Every room in her home was affected and is now in need of remodeling.
Most, if not all, of her furniture was ruined in the incident. More importantly to her, family heirlooms and keepsakes, which don’t come with an easy price tag, are probably lost forever.
Since that time, Millican has been living in a motel and basically waiting — waiting for the moment when her home is actually her home again.
City of Snyder Human Resources Coordinator Theleca Wilson said the culprit for the deluge of sewage was a chunk of concrete that somehow found its way into the interior of the city’s main sewage line, ultimately causing the backflow into Millican’s house on July 14.
How the concrete got inside the sewer line is a mystery, Wilson said.
“We don’t know how it got there,” she said. “There’s just no way to tell how it happened.”
A cleanup crew removed all the offensive material from her house. Since then, a contractor has been working to get the house ready for occupation again. Millican said all the floors had to be torn out and replaced, as well as the sheetrock up to two feet above floor level. She is hopeful she will be able to move back into her home before Christmas.
Millican estimates that the total bill, which includes temporary lodging in a hotel in the five months since the incident, will be around $100,000. In a way, however, she considers herself lucky: Her home insurance covers such “black water” repairs to her home and has paid her motel bill. Her only out-of-pocket cost — aside from day-to-day expenses — is the insurance deductible.
However, she believes she is due at least a little financial help from the city. Since the discharge was apparently caused by a problem in the city’s main sewer line, Millican would like to see the city pay the deductible portion of her insurance costs, although she is doubtful that will happen.
“This is not my fault. There was nothing wrong with my sewer line,” Milican said. “My insurance company said I’m probably not going to get anything from the city … but it’s not right.”
She also would like the city to give her a break on her water, sewer and trash collection bill, since she has not been living at her residence.
“You’d think the minimum the city could do would be to discount part of my utility bill. And they won’t even do that,” she said.
She is understandably irate at what happened to her home, but what has her even more distressed is what she describes as an almost total disregard of her situation by Snyder officials.
“If I took my vehicle and ran through the front of your house, wouldn’t I have to pay for that?” she asked rhetorically. “But this happened to me and the city just basically walked away.”
The city arranged for the cleanup crew to clear the sewage. In addition, it paid a week of Millican’s motel bill before her insurance kicked in.
“And we were not obligated to do that,” Wilson said.
Since the city considers the incident an act of God, officials are non-committal as to what, if any, further financial assistance the city will provide to Millican.
“The Texas Municipal League (the city’s insurance provider) is waiting on information from her insurance provider,” City Manager Merle Taylor said. “This is a process that usually takes several months. We’ve done everything we can up to this point.”
The biggest lesson other residents can take from this incident, Millican said, is to make sure their insurance policies cover incidents such as what happened to her home.
“I’m wanting people to check with their insurance company and make sure they cover black water (incidents),” she said. “It’s my understanding that a lot of them don’t.”