DAYTON - Patricia Becker remem- bers the smell like it was yesterday.

On an early fall morning three years ago, she went to her son's home to get it ready for his return from a week at the hospital in Walla Walla. When she opened the door, an unpleasant odor struck her nostrils and she discovered that raw sewage was coming into the house on East Patit through two floor drains in the basement.

"It went all the way up to the wall," Becker, who owns 306 East Patit, said in an in- terview this weekend.

To Becker, the stench wasn't completely unfamil- iar. Sewage had come up through the drains a year earlier and her neighbors had reported similar incidents.

Becker's Saturday morn- ing discovery led to a week- end of troubleshooting and to a three-year process in which she went after the City of Dayton for negligence.

Last week, Becker and city closed the book on the whole distasteful chapter after Judge Acey ruled the city was not responsive enough that weekend but isn't gener- ally negligent in the main- tenance of its sewer infra- structure. The Becker family was awarded a $29,049.33 judgment to cover the cost of the repairs to their basement.

But the case raises the question whether it can happen again, while residents like Becker who have been hit by backups wonder just how sound the city's sewer system is.

The system

Papers filed in Columbia County Superior Court dur- ing the trial show that over a 10-year period Dayton received and settled a number of claims caused by sewer issues.

Residents of Dayton or any other city can file a claim if they feel a government entity is liable for damages done to their property: a rock from a city truck or street sweeper hitting a window, water damage from a broken main to their yard, an under- ground cable cut accidentally during road construction and so on.

From 2002 to 2012, residents filed 23 claims and the city's insurance carrier paid out $62,937 in damages. According to a report from Cities Insurance Association of Washington, 13 or slightly more than half of the claims were described as "sewer back up."

Of all the claims, the damage caused by sewer backups accounted for $47,478 or 75 percent of the total with costs ranging from $18 to $21,553.

"It doesn't surprise me," said Mayor Craig George, who blames the backups mostly on residents flushing a large number of inappropri- ate items or substances down their toilets or sinks, such as tampons, diapers, grease and so on. "We still have unbe- lievable things coming down the system."

George said Dayton isn't the only city with a high percentage of sewer back up claims. For many city leaders, it's a top problem because of some of their residents' sanitary carelessness.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water Management, the bulk of sewage backups in any size city are caused by blockages, accounting for 43 percent of all causes.

In Waitsburg (whose pop- ulation is between half and a third that of Dayton's), resi- dents filed five claims against the city during the past 10 years with three of them stemming from sewer back- ups, Waitsburg City Manager Randy Hinchliffe said. "We hardly have any."

Hinchliffe attributed the difference in part to a five- year $350,000 investment relining about half of Waits- burg's 10 miles of sewer pipes.

A 2007 study conducted by Anderson Perry of Walla Walla found that Dayton's sewer system, though getting older, wasn't all that bad. The firm sent cameras down the terra cotta pipes to get a read on it.

"Overall, given the age of the system, the city's collec- tion system is in fair to good condition," according to the study. "There are portions of the system that need cor- rection and, in general, more time and money needs to be invested in cleaning, mainte- nance and inspection of the collection system."

Those "portions" include 425 linear feet of clay sewer main between Washington Street and Patit, North First and North Second - the area where the Beckers live. Here, the study found "numerous bellies in the main containing debris," "a crack and a hole in one pipe section" and "three laterals (line from main to home) with potential infiltra­tion and inflow."

"The number of bellies and amount of debris ob­served in this line are of con­cern," according to the study. "However, the overall condi­tion of this main precluded replacement. This main should be cleaned more often due to the observed bellies and debris."

Other sewer sections mentioned in the engineering analysis include the alleys between Commercial Street and Washington, North First and North Second; the main under the Seneca property and the alleys between Com­mercial Street and Washing­ton between North Third and North Fourth.

The crew

On behalf of the Beckers, Hubbard tried to establish that the city was not only negligent in responding to the family's sewer backup on that Saturday morning in October 2010, but also as a general rule.

"The city is too stingy with its money to run its sewer system properly," Hubbard contended in a re­cent interview. "The Beckers did this for themselves and for everyone on the system."

The trial in itself was un­usual for two reasons. In the past, the city's insurance car­rier would have been more likely to settle and, since even a favorable outcome does not result in the plain­tiff's reimbursement of attor­neys' fees in these types of cases, most claimants would have balked at the expense of a trial and bailed.

Not the Beckers, who said they were ready to call the carrier's bluff.

"They thought we would cave," Patricia Becker said about the carrier's legal team. "This has been an ongoing problem for many, many years. We had gotten the water before. The neigh­bors had it. I had enough of it all. It wasn't being ad­dressed."

During the trial, Hubbard brought in an expert witness, a sewer contractor from Woodinville, to underscore the Becker's allegation of general negligence. The wit­ness, Jim Platt, said Dayton has no organized inspection or maintenance schedule and no timely response to emergencies.

But although Acey ruled for the plaintiffs when it came to the city's alleged lack of response during the weekend of her sewer back­up, he didn't buy the rest of their argument.

Mayor Craig said he takes exception to the notion the crews were negligent then or any other time, pointing to a regular routine of wintertime flushing, the purchase of new equipment and an in­creased sewer maintenance budget - all since the 2007 Anderson Perry study.

"We're still convinced we were in the right," he said. "We felt we did our due diligence."

Court documents show there was some confusion that weekend. Patricia Beck­er first placed a call to the city's public works depart­ment to notify it of the prob­lem, then called in two local plumbers to address it. When the chunky gray water ap­peared to be on retreat, she called the city back to say things were under control.

But they weren't. Sew­age had been coming into a neighbor's home across the street at 303 E. Patit and the sewage continued to flow into the Beckers' basement on Sunday and Monday when a city crew showed up to address the problem.

The solution

Despite all the allega­tions and the ruling, no one, including the Beckers and Hubbard, blamed the city workers personally for what happened or what they see as a lack of systematic preven­tative maintenance.

They said the city sim­ply has to devote more re­sources and be more pro­active when it comes to keeping the lines clean. "I was trying to get their attention," Patricia Beck­er said. "The crews know more needs to be done. This wasn't a game to me. I did it to improve things."

Hubbard put it this way: "(City Supervisor Jim) Costello is a capable guy, but he needs the treasurer's support."

But Craig said Dayton already does what it can without bumping up its rates significantly.

In the past four years, its sewer revenues have gone up from $800,000 in 2009 to $863,000 this year. Resi­dential rates have increased from $40.95 per month to $48.35 per month during the same period.

More than 90 percent of the revenues are used to cover sewer expenses, while the remainder has been go­ing into a reserve - now estimated at $100,000 - to help with the construction of a new sewer treatment plant in 2018.

After the expense of pay­ing off revenue bonds, which consume 35 percent of the sewer budget, the next larg­est expense post in the sewer budget is maintenance at 28.3 percent. It tops the operations and maintenance budget of the sewer treat­ment of 21.2 percent.

Besides regular flushing, investing in new equipment, maintenance and responding to emergencies on the day they happen, the city doesn't have the resources to do more, said Craig, who noted the city often gets compli­ments on the maintenance crew's swift response time.

"If you have all the mon­ey in the world, proactive is fine," he said. "But we don't want to push up the rates."

Waitsburg's Hinchliffe said that city's relining proj­ect was a worthwhile invest­ment.

Involving a flexible PVC material that can be heated and adheres to the inside of the old clay tubes, the cost is about one fifth of replacing the lines.

But unlike Dayton, Waits­burg doesn't face the loom­ing prospect of financing and building a new sewer treatment plant. Waitsburg replaced its plant more than 10 years ago and it was only because there was money left over that the city could even plan a relining project.

Ironically, relining sewer mains may actually cause more problems for home­owners, who are responsible for maintaining the sewer branch from the main to their house. Always clambering for water, tree roots that find their way blocked by the impenetrable plastic enter the next nearest source of the liquid, Hinchliffe explained.

Dayton resident Roger Becker in the basement of his home on East Patit. The Becker family won a $29,000 judg- ment against the city, which Judge William Acey found negligent in responding to a sewer backup that occured at the house almost three years ago.