Anne Alcorn loves her neighbors, her 7-year-old son’s school and the safety of the Oakmont Commons.
There’s only one thing she’d change about her home. The flooding.
Since moving there in 2016, Alcorn, 38, has had an issue with her backyard flooding during rainstorms.
On multiple occasions, water has come “within a half-inch” of entering her home, and in some cases, has flooded the crawl space under it, she said.
“At some points, when I walk in the backyard, the water comes up to my knees,” she said.
Alcorn had to replace her sump pump three times at $1,500 each time, and paid over $900 to get her crawl space pumped out. She has had to get rid of outdoor furniture and replace multiple dehumidifiers, she said.
Other residents have paid thousands of dollars for repairs from water damage, including replacing broken pipes, installing new carpet and flooring, and replacing ruined furnaces and air conditioning units.
Although some of the townhouses in the Commons are rentals, others, like Alcorn, own their townhomes. That means they are on the hook to pay for repairs.
Alcorn said she and her neighbors have been asking borough officials for help for years. They have become so accustomed to the water that they are in regular contact with the borough’s volunteer fire department and its flooding pump.
“The fire department has been amazing,” Alcorn said. “It’s like second nature to them at this point. They show up and they don’t even have to speak. They just know what they’re doing.”
Borough Manager Scot Fodi said the water that residents are seeing is overflow from Oakmont’s 13th Street neighborhood. There’s piping in the hillside that does not divert the water but, rather, sends it cascading down the hillside into the Commons, turning the townhome neighborhood into a catch basin for the excess water.
“When it comes down the hillside, it looks like Niagara Falls,” Alcorn said. “It’s just all this water coming down at once.”
Alcorn said she is worried about the hill eroding before anything is resolved.
“We hear trees falling on that hill all the time,” she said. “I sleep in my back bedroom. If a tree falls on the house, I could get really hurt or worse.”
Alcorn said they’ve asked for anything that could stem the water. After a while, they began asking for a temporary fix because “anything was better than nothing.”
Alcorn said the Commons’ homeowners association put in a long sand bag that spanned multiple backyards in an attempt to divert the water away from homes.
“All it did was kill the grass,” Alcorn said. “The water just went right over it. They attempted to do something very minuscule, and it wasn’t effective.”
There are French drains and catch basins in the Commons, but they have been ineffective when battling the amount of water coming down the hill.
“We understand that it’s not going to be a quick fix,” Alcorn said. “We just need help.”
Despite the borough having money reserved for flooding abatement projects, the situation that Alcorn and her neighbors are experiencing does not qualify for the money. As surface runoff, the water doesn’t meet the definition of flooding tied to that money.
“We’ve had some ongoing discussions with a handful of residents about the stormwater runoff,” Fodi said.
On Tuesday, Oakmont Council announced plans to address the runoff from 13th Street. Fodi said they plan to use a little under $200,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to carve into the hillside to fix the grading.
They are planning to redirect the water into a cement bowl. The bowl will filter the water into a pipe that will direct it to different catch basins in the neighborhood and, ultimately, into Plum Creek, which runs through the Commons. According to Fodi, 10 of the townhomes in the Commons are being regularly affected by the runoff.
Once council members vote to approve the project, Fodi said, the borough will need permission from property owners to install the piping. They are hoping to award bids by June to begin work.
Haley Daugherty is a TribLive reporter covering local politics, feature stories and Allegheny County news. A native of Pittsburgh, she lived in Alabama for six years. She joined the Trib in 2022 after graduating from Chatham University. She can be reached at hdaugherty@triblive.com.
