After his yard has been flooded with raw sewage for the third time in the six years that Tony Ramos has stayed in his Strubenvale home, he is fed up.
“I can’t keep living like this,” he says.
During the thunderstorm last Wednesday night, sewage containing visible pieces of human waste pushed up through three of the drains on this property, causing a dam to form on his lawn and around his washing line.
Ramos maintains that the roots of a dead tree next to the manhole directly across the street from his house, is the cause.
“They’ve cleaned it out with buckets in the past, but it obviously wasn’t enough,” he says.
He says that on the other occasions, Metro workers simply pushed a rod through the drain every time it blocked and hoped for the best.
Read:Â Bloody sewage water spews from manhole
“It just goes on and on and on,” Ramos added.
Margie Weideman has lived in the house next door to Ramos for 47 years and says that the issue isn’t anything new.
“The previous homeowners experienced the same problem,” she says.
Ramos is also unhappy that it takes Metro between two to three working days to show up, to clean the mess each time.
Read:Â Sewage is once again leaking in Dersley
He visited the Metro customer care centre in Brakpan on Friday morning to complain as nothing had been done yet – and says that the Metro arrived a few hours later to unblock the drains.
As the smell was unbearable, Ramos cleaned the sewage on his property himself.
