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Monticello mobile home park has sewage spills
Residents at the Meadows Mobile Home Park in Monticello say raw sewage is spilling under homes and onto lawns, leaving behind foul smells, feces and toilet paper.
MONTICELLO, Minn. (FOX 9) - Residents at a Monticello mobile home park are dealing with raw sewage spilling under their homes and across their lawns, and they said it keeps happening.
Sewage backing up at mobile home park
What we know:
At The Meadows mobile home park, raw sewage has been pooling under homes and spilling onto lawns. Residents are also dealing with the foul smell that comes with it and what they said is potentially dangerous sewer gas.
"It's a very strong gas. It's also highly explosive," said Stephanie Pula, a resident at the park.
Pula said her neighbor's yard has been hit hard, but she has dealt with the same problem herself.
Just days ago, her neighbor Ed Berner found a pipe leaking dirty water onto his grass.
"It was spilling all over. I'm actually probably standing on spots where the sewer water was running," said Berner, who has lived at the park for more than a decade. "There's still feces in there, there's toilet paper."
A landlord that's hard to reach
What they're saying:
Residents said getting the landlord to respond has been a struggle.
"They don't respond to me, personally. They'll read my messages, they'll read my emails, and typically they don't answer me," said Pula.
She also described a situation where the property manager told her a plumber would arrive in two hours, but when she called the plumbing company herself, she found out the appointment had been scheduled for the next morning.
Pula said the park's response to these issues has been inconsistent.
"The park will kind of let things slide or do a poor job at their cleanup attempts," she said.
Berner believes the real fix requires more extensive work.
"It's going to happen again unless they address the actual real problem, which is further down the line, and I'm sure it's something that they have to dig up, and they don't want to pay to do," he said.
This isn't the first time
The backstory:
In March, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency fined the property nearly $14,000 over a sewage spill last year. According to the agency, the property "discharged less than 50 gallons of untreated sewage...." The state gave the property a month to fix the problem, but it took more than four months to do so, the agency said.