Plumbers discovered Nick Davies’ stormwater pipe goes nowhere. Photo: Nick Davies.
Every time it rains, Nick Davies’ backyard becomes a swamp. It doesn’t have to rain for 40 days and 40 nights, either – 40 minutes of good rain is enough.
All of his house’s downpipes spew water. The lowest corner of the yard fills up to a depth of about 10 cm. The property’s wooden fences are all rotting in sediment, washed down from all the property’s high points.
It’s been this way ever since he moved into a street in Amaroo, Gungahlin, seven years ago. And judging by the existing mesh on the house’s gutters, the previous owners also struggled with the same flooding problem.
“Pretty much from day dot, we’ve been having problems with our stormwater, downpipes filling up and backflowing until they flood our backyard,” he says.
“When you look at our property, the right-hand rear is pretty much always dead – everything we’ve planted and tried to grow has died. And it’s the same on the neighbour’s side. It just gets pounded with water.
“I was thinking, ‘All right, the gutters must be blocked’, so we went through the process of cleaning them all out.”
But after years of investigation and plumbing work, he’s found the root problem. And these Amaroo residents might not be the only victims.
Water rushing down the pipe – with nowhere to go – has carved out a hole. Photo: Nick Davies.
It turns out that in 1999, when the street was built, his property’s stormwater pipe was not connected to the street’s main stormwater channel.
“The pipe had never been connected to the stormwater – it just stopped at the road. It was just going into dirt basically. The guy who came to look at it laughed and said he’d never seen anything like it.
“The stormwater mains run straight down the middle of the street, but they never connected the two.”
He’s not sure how widespread the problem is, but if you live in Amaroo – or any of Canberra’s pre-2000s suburbs – and your stormwater system is constantly overflowing, he says it might be worth checking.
“Nothing I did could stop the flooding … I’ve gone through two plumbers over the years, and concluded we maybe just didn’t have the right drainage on our property to deal with all the water.”
Flooding in Nick Davies’ backyard. Photo: Nick Davies.
During the hunt, he forked out about $6000 to have an inspection point installed along the stormwater pipe’s route down the road, which involved removing several trees and digging a trench in his front yard down to about 1.5 metres.
According to the ACT Government, properties in newer suburbs are meant to be connected to the stormwater system at this inspection point (also called a “tie point”), which is installed on the boundary between private and public land.
As it is, the new inspection point has taken the pressure off Davies’ backyard by providing the stormwater with an outlet, but it hasn’t solved the bigger issue.
“It now floods at the inspection point,” he says.
“I’m just dumbfounded how it was approved. Obviously, I’m just one house on the street, but we were all built at the same time, so I’d love to know if other people are having issues too.”
In response to questions, an ACT Government spokesperson told Region the problem can be traced to lower building standards in place at the time.
“The reason why this happens is varied,” they said.
“In original homes built in older suburbs within the inner south and north, there was often no connection provided in accordance with standards of the time. In other cases, connection may be via the kerb and gutter, rather than direct to the pipe network.”
Amaroo was gazetted on 18 October 1991, and means “a beautiful place” in Nyoongar. Image: James Fletcher.
The government suggests that others suffering similar problems first engage the services of a plumber, who can also “assist with the process of connecting the homeowner’s stormwater to the public stormwater network” with a tie.
“The stormwater tie can be connected via a pipe to a stormwater main, to the back of a sump or to the kerb of a street.”
To start the process and find out whether the issue is on private or public land, residents can also lodge an online enquiry via the government’s online maintenance request portal, Fix My Street. There’s an online form for residents to “apply for reimbursement for blockages and damages cause by ACT Government infrastructure” too.
For Davies, the issue has yet to be resolved – but he’s most annoyed he’s been left out of pocket.
“That’s something the government should have inspected and put in.”
