While relaxing in Florida on a Wednesday in May, Ruth Yu received one of those phone calls – the kind with the potential to destroy even a perfect vacation. On the other end of the line was her dog walker who explained that her Woodland Avenue home had seen serious flooding after a major rain swept Springfield.

“We’ll take care of it when we get back,” Yu responded initially. Think again, her dog walker told her. “Finally, she came through the phone and slapped me,” Yu says. It wasn’t just a little bit of excess water around her home. The car parked in Yu’s attached garage had been submerged up to the dashboard in water that the sewers underfoot couldn’t take on, and the basement was a pool of muddy water. By the time the Yu family returned to Illinois three days later, professionals they’d hired over the phone had already started the cleanup, but the odor greeting them at the front door was hardly the ideal homecoming.

Yu’s neighbors all have similar tales ripe with descriptions of stalled or destroyed cars, toilet paper pushed up backyard drains and raw sewage flowing backwards through their lower level toilets. After another heavy rain fell in August, many of Yu’s neighbors found themselves repeating the cleanup they’d just completed.

“So far, they’ve looked and there’s been a lot of debris,” Yu says. “But I can’t believe that’s going to take care of the problem.”

After the August flooding, Terrence Paoli, who lives in the same neighborhood as Yu, circulated a petition hoping the strength of a group complaint would lead to answers. “Ithink, really, our wish is that there was some further investigation into the problem and that we get a response.”

The city did respond, but continues to offer the same daunting refrain: Old pipes tasked with handling more water than they’re designed to carry mean problems will occur. It’s just a matter of when and where. “We’ve had problems everywhere, if you think about it, but it’s really hit and miss,” says Michael Wallner, superintendent of the Springfield public works sewer division.

Anne Logue agrees flooding is not just a problem limited to Yu and Paoli’s neighborhood. The Sangamon Valley Group Sierra Club board member sits on a citizens advisory committee that’s reviewing the environmental effects the area’s aging sewer systems have on nearby bodies of water. She says flooding is a problem throughout the city – from the Hazel Dell area on the south side to Bengel Street on the north end. Both Logue and Yu also reference flooding under a downtown underpass that resulted in the Aug. 20 drowning of 23-year-old Leanna Pokora.

But as the problem has gotten worse with more extreme rain events in the last couple of years, the city has cut back on sewer maintenance. Wallner estimates that the city used to

clean 50 to 70 miles of sewers every year, but the sewer division has been a victim of the city’s budget woes. Through attrition, it’s lost four members from its cleaning and repair crews, bringing the on-site sewer staff down to only 15 members. Wallner says the city now can manage to clean only about 40 miles of pipe each year.

The city also maintains a long-range plan identifying about 65 different sewer projects to be completed in the next 10 years. But Wallner and public works superintendent Mike Norris say the continually revised $52.7 million plan is really more of a wish list.

Even so, just refurbishing or replacing the sewer system that’s already in place isn’t a comprehensive enough approach, nor is it necessarily thinking long-term, Logue says. She adds that the root of flooding problems is not just too much water but also too many impervious surfaces, such as sidewalks, roads and parking lots – infrastructure for which there are greener alternatives.