CADILLAC — Filthy, disgusting and virtually uninhabitable, those are the words a Cadillac woman is using to describe raw sewage being filtered out of a basement window into her backyard.
Kaylee Curtis said she moved into her new apartment just two weeks ago and her kids suddenly started getting sick.
That’s when she discovered raw sewage being funneled from her neighbor’s basement into her backyard, where her children play.
Curtis said she was told the home did not have a basement.
“I’m under the impression there is no basement at all. Come to find out, there’s a whole basement full of human feces. To me, that means you covered the problem and were trying to hide it.”
She spent $3,000 to secure the place for her family and said the landlord, Rose Fowler, refused to give her any money back.
Curtis said her kid’s health has been declining since they moved in May 1.
“My kids have to go to the hospital and get blood tests, get full evaluations because of them being sick with a fever. They both have runny noses since playing out there, coughs and everything else. I’ve contacted the landlord, and the landlord said she was never made aware of this issue.”
Tenant Maggie Ricket said Fowler is not a slumlord.
“Rose has been a very good landlord, she’s been very honest, very decent prices. She rented a home for me and my five-year-old son when nobody else would.”
While that may be, Ricket also said
“The sewage backed up into my apartment.”
Ricketts has been dealing with the sewage in her basement since late December. She doesn’t see it as a big deal and thinks Curtis is going overboard causing unnecessary trouble.
When asked if living with raw sewage in the basement and the backyard had been an inconvenience, Ricket had this to say:
“No, because I don’t go into the basement. The only time that it becomes a very bad situation is when the smell starts coming up. And that’s when we had to start actually sub-pumping into the yard because the smell started coming up. ”
The City of Cadillac’s water management superintendent, Patrick Bigelow, has given the landlord 7 days to correct what he called a biohazard.
I reached out to the landlord; she didn’t want to go on camera but said she would comply with the city order and have it fixed.