GREEN RIVER — A Green River resident addressed the Green River City Council Tuesday night regarding an issue with his home in which sewage piping was never connected to the city’s system. 

Dan Dean and his family bought their house on New Mexico Street in 2019, and experienced no issues with the sewage until one day in August of this year, which left them without sewer service for four days and a fairly high financial burden. 

Dean brought a contractor in and they believed that the sewer line collapsed near the home. They started digging up the driveway and sidewalk to identify where the collapsed line was, however, they discovered that it was another issue. 

“My house has a thin wall pipe coming from the residence out to the street and then a heavy wall pipe from the city tap to the property line. And those two pipes were actually never connected,” Dean said. 

“They physically couldn’t have been connected without a coupler and those couplers were not found in the hole,” he continued. “There was a 41 inch gap basically underneath the sidewalk where there was no sewer line whatsoever.” 

Dean said that when they bought the home they paid for a pretty extensive home inspection, and part of that inspection was a flow test. He said that the house passed the flow test and they were given a green light to purchase. 

According to Dean, the documentation for the house has a sewer section but nothing on the actual tie in, and there is only one inspection sheet on record for his home. He said that there was no electrical portion filled out on the inspection, indicating to him that the inspection was not very thorough. 

“The end result was that the pipe was never connected. It was missed and that burden fell on me and my family in August of this year,” he said. “It flowed for 15 years like that.” 

Dean said he and his wife filed a claim for the cost of the repair and it was denied. 

“I think that we were pretty amicable and honest when we asked for those costs. That was strictly the cost of the repair, it didn’t include the cost of our driveway that’s also significantly displaced… or some of the other costs that were incurred from this process,” he said. 

His hopes in coming to the Council was to find help and representation in this process. Mayor Pete Rust said that the Council will schedule a meeting to discuss this further with Dean. 

“We need to talk about this, we need to have a meeting. We will do that, we will schedule it and get ahold of you,” Rust said. 

Councilman Mike Shutran also thanked Dean for coming forward and bringing this to the Council’s attention.