Cityscape

A sewer-pipe rebuttal

by Brian Hanscom

Gordon Simonds thinks he got a raw deal, and he's ready to make a stink about it. Simonds, owner of 37 Crescent Street, the property recently shut down by the city due to sewer-blockage problems, says he was "vilified by the officials of our local government" and that the Portland Press Herald subjected him to "malicious newspaper coverage" during the ordeal. Simonds has distributed a nine-page rebuttal outlining the mess from day-one in order to "somehow clear my name from all the malicious newspaper coverage" and "finger pointing statements by a municipality gone mad."

In the rebuttal, Simonds details a month-long operation attempting to fix a blockage in a sewer line running from the city's sewer main to his property. As Simonds explains, he soon learned that the sewer line servicing his building was attached to a collapsed city sewer line that had been abandoned since 1923. Simonds dug along the pipe leading from 37 Crescent [the lateral pipe], 16 feet underground, to find the main it connected to, partially because he could not get city officials to tell him the location or depth of the active water main. "The city had refused to tell me on June 5 where the active sewer main was, or even how deep beneath the surface it was," claims Simonds in his treatise. "I was told that was `my problem' by Mr. [Jim] Sloane of the Department of Public Works." Peter DeWitt at Public Works says the information Simonds was after is available at Public Works. But Simonds claims that the map he obtained only showed the start and end of the pipe. "Those maps will not tell you depth, distance from house, or grade," writes Simonds. In addition to not having the schematics of the main sewer pipe on the map Simonds claims, "[T]he abandoned sewer main itself was not on any city sewer map which I could get, but was found by the city on a map in its archives."

Simonds dug the entire length of the lateral pipe by hand, looking for its connection to the main sewer pipe, he says. He had called six different excavating companies to machine dig but found that they could not do the work because of the area's topography, which Simonds describes as "an 80-foot hill falling away at about a 45 degree angle down to Congress Street."

City manager Bob Ganley made accusations at a city council meeting, and was quoted in the Press Herald, saying that Simonds was "too cheap" to fix the problem by using an excavator to complete the work in a more timely fashion. Simonds claims Ganley had only limited knowledge of the situation at the time and suggested solutions that were unrealistic because the city never sent engineers to survey the land. Ganley, when asked to comment on Simonds allegations, said, "We [Ganley and Simonds] have had this conversation. I don't think anything productive can come out of continuing the debate."

But as angry as Simonds is with the city, he is even more displeased with the Press Herald. "They painted me as an operator of illegal properties who had neglected to fix an unsanitary condition," Gordon alleges. "They were unconcerned that the lateral sewer line [running from Simonds's property to the main line] was not on any city sewer map and connected to a city sewer main which had been abandoned since 1923, 77 years." To add insult to injury, Simonds notes that the Press Herald "devoted 258 square inches" to "slander" him on the front page over two days, and only "eight square inches buried in the paper" when it was printed that the collapsed abandoned city line had caused the back-up of sewage. Press Herald managing editor Curt Hazlett notes that Simonds has registered his complaints with the paper. "All we can say," Hazlett explains, "is that we feel our stories were fair and accurate and we stand by them."

Simonds feels he was forced to write the rebuttal as a last ditch effort. "I did the only thing I could do given the circumstances," laments Simonds. "I was vilified by the paper and city officials when they had no knowledge of the situation. And they won't retract. They won't investigate it. I don't want them to retract and take my word for it. Investigate it and find out for yourselves."