Natasza Bock-Singleton can smell it from where she sits in her basement home office. She could also hear—the gurgling sound coming from the bathroom. She got up and wanted to know what had happened.

Bok Singleton said that this is "the geyser of human feces coming out of the toilet."

She grabs overshoes and gloves from her mud room, puts on them, and uses Shop-Vac to transfer the accumulated sewage to her backyard.

Bock-Singleton said: "If you can imagine walking into a public toilet where no one has flushed the toilet and multiplying it by 100, that's what it looks like."

Soon after a heavy rain, sewage flooded. Then, she, her husband and their three children began to clean up sewage, toilet paper fragments, condoms and other debris that had spilled into their home.

Bock-Singleton said: "Everyone cleaned everything up on the deck."

After having to throw away the contaminated Shop-Vac and tiles and replace the bathroom gypsum board, she invested $30,000 to install backflow prevention valves in the horizontal sewer pipes of her house to prevent backflow in the future.

This is the first time her house has been flooded by sewage.

Thousands of Baltimore residents report that they have sewers in their homes. To solve this problem, the city launched a reimbursement plan in April 2018. The program is operated by the Ministry of Public Works and allows residents to apply to the city government for reimbursement for the cost of spare cleaning of sewers, up to a maximum of US$5,000 per reimbursement.

However, few people applied for the program, and only a small percentage of people actually saw the city's payment. An analysis by the Capital News Service found that the program’s eligibility requirements caused most applications to be rejected.

According to the data obtained through the request of the CNS through the Public Information Law, since the program was launched in April 2018, as of March 24, 2021, residents have only submitted 120 reimbursement requests. Of these requests, only 19 were approved.

According to records obtained by CNS through the city's public data portal, in the same period, the city's 311 service received more than 18,700 reports related to household sewage backup. In 2020 alone, residents reported more than 7,000 backups.

When asked about the small number of applicants for the program, Yosef Kebede, head of DPW's water and wastewater agency, admitted that when the program started in 2018, the city's outreach work was not active.

"I understand why this gets people's attention," Kebede said.

He said that communication has improved since then. For example, he said that when heavy rain is forecast, DPW will send reminders about the plan on social media.

The Bock-Singleton home returned to normal again later in 2018 after 2 inches of rain pushed sewage through the backflow preventer. This time, she applied for reimbursement from the city government. She said that she was rejected because the city found a stick in her sewer.

If the DPW investigator determines that the only reason for the backup is a wet weather event, the reimbursement plan only covers cleanup costs. Although it rained more than 2 inches the day before Bock-Singleton's substitute, the line of sticks disqualified her.

Domestic sewage backup is part of a larger problem: Baltimore's sewer infrastructure is old and overburdened.

The city's sewer system has a history of more than a century. The pipeline has cracks, misalignments or other failures. These faults cause rainwater and groundwater to flood into sewers, causing sewage to flow back.

Other problems can also cause or lead to spills, including blockages caused by tree roots or improperly flushed products such as baby wipes and menstrual products.

"You will soon reach the threshold where the system is overwhelmed," said Marcus Hendricks, director of the Rainwater Infrastructure Resilience and Justice Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

This is a combination of "fragile infrastructure systems, increasing development, and more frequent and intense wet weather events due to climate change, which are causing these overflows and backups, not only in Baltimore, but throughout the city-state, "He said.

Baltimore’s sewer system has long dumped human waste where it does not belong. A pressure relief valve built decades ago directs sewage overflow into rivers and tributaries leading to the Chesapeake Bay. According to the city’s report, in 2020 alone, nearly 50 million gallons of sewage and water will be mixed and almost all will flow into Jones Falls.

Since reaching agreements with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice, and the Maryland Department of Environment in 2002, the city has invested more than $830 million in preventing overflows and improving sewer infrastructure. The agreement was called a consent order and avoided the threat of a lawsuit from these agencies that accused the city of polluting waterways in violation of the Clean Water Act.

As the city closed the pressure relief valve, the backflow of sewage in the home began to occur frequently. According to the Baltimore Sun, there were 622 backups in 2004. In the ten years before 2015, there were more than 5,000 backups per year.

After the city failed to complete the sewer overhaul by the 2015 deadline, the city formulated an expedited reimbursement plan as part of the revised consent order.

The plan only covers cleaning, disinfection, and disposal costs related to “capacity-related wet weather events”, which are defined on the DPW website as at least a quarter of an inch of precipitation within 24 hours causing “sewage overload or overflow”.

Homeowners and tenants can apply for reimbursement by filling out the application form online, email or post. Applicants must provide supporting documents, including copies of receipts for cleaning and disinfection costs. Residents whose applications are rejected can still file general liability claims with the municipal legal department for property losses.

Since the start of the program in April 2018, New York City has rejected approximately 84% of applications — 101 of the 120 applications submitted by residents have been rejected. (Four applications were rejected because they were related to backups that occurred before the start of the program.) The latest application in the data reviewed by CNS was received in February 2021.

Approximately 23% of people were rejected because they did not report the sewage backup within 24 hours after the occurrence, and this requirement is not until July 2020. Even after the cancellation of the 24-hour reporting requirement, the city still rejected more than 80% of applications.

According to program data, since the start of the reimbursement program, the city has paid applicants less than $20,000. The consent order sets the annual reimbursement fund to "at least US$2 million."

When asked why the expenditure is so small, Kebede said that the bureau’s budget is paid for by residents’ water bills, so it needs to limit how the funds are used.

"The denial is based on procedures and agreements that we must follow and abide by," he said. "No one feels good about it."

City Councillor Kristerfer Burnett initiated a bill that would require DPW to study accelerated reimbursement plans and related plans, and report whether it is feasible to allow these plans to cover all sewage backups, not just those caused by wet weather.

Burnett said his voters have experienced a back-up caused by wet weather and dry weather. He said these plans also have fairness issues. The cleanup cost of backup hurts those who are struggling the most with income.

He said: "I think [in the project] only some standards are not enough to serve our citizens."

If investigators find obstructions such as rags, grease, debris or roots in the sewer, the city will reject the claim. In this case, the possibility of overloading in wet weather is ruled out-even if it rained before the sewage was backed up.

This happened to Dorothy Conaway, a retired educator who has lived in her home on Belvieu Avenue for nearly 47 years. In a telephone interview, she read the rejection letter she received from the city government in response to her request for reserve reimbursement on July 25, 2018.

The letter said: "The investigators of the agency responded to your incident and determined that the incident was not caused by wet weather causing the sewer collection system to overload, but by rags and debris removed from the main line of the sanitary sewer. "It said'view attachment', I never got it," Conaway added.

The previous day, July 24, the city received more than 4 inches of rainfall, the second most on record.

On May 27, 2018, heavy rain swept through Maryland on the same day, flooding the streets of Ellicott City, Rachel and Nikki Mutinda's home in West Baltimore, filled with sewage sludge.

According to project data, the city found that the sewer pipes were charging additional fees, and Mutindas reimbursed them for $1,000 of the $2,500 they requested because insurance had already paid part of the cost, making them one of the 19 households allowed to be reimbursed.

Rachel Mutinda said she believes she and her husband learned about the city’s reimbursement plan from an article shortly after the backup.

"It's not obvious where to find this information," Nicky Mutinda said.

Rachel Mutinda (Rachel Mutinda) said that from application to success, you need perseverance, proficiency in the Internet and the freedom to follow the city during the working day.

"Not everyone has this ability to persist," she said.

Contact with human excreta can be very dangerous; Christopher Heaney, an environmental epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, told city councillors at the 2019 hearing on sewage reserve that it can carry parasites , Viruses and bacteria.

Heaney added that the moisture in the sewage can lead to the growth of mold, fungi and other harmful microorganisms-"This is a huge problem for people with respiratory health problems."

Leah Brown worries about the health of her 6-year-old daughter Tierney, who has asthma.

Their home was flooded with sewage many times, from the shower drain in the basement that seeped into the home where Brown shared with her husband Tony Murray, her daughter and two teenage sons in Howard Park. In one such case, a contractor found black mold while cutting the basement wall.

Brown said, "Too many." "That part is really scary."

On March 23 this year, Mayor Brandon Scott and DPW announced a one-year pilot program that will allow the city to directly contract third-party clean-up services and send them to people who have undergone backups. Through the reimbursement plan, residents need to pay for cleaning expenses and then request reimbursement. For the new Sewage Site Support (SOS) cleanup plan, the city pays for a third-party cleanup service and sends it to the person who reports the backup-if they qualify. (The SOS plan will not replace the reimbursement plan; residents can choose between the two.)

Once investigators determine that the residents' backup is caused by wet weather, they will ask the residents if they want the city government to send cleaning services to their homes. Kebede said he hopes that the simplified process of the SOS program will benefit more residents. He said that in an interview on May 5, the program has helped five people so far.

The day after the mayor’s announcement, Brown’s home was again filled with sewage. Brown said that when she called 311, the city government did not notify her of the existence of any cleanup plan. Instead, she heard about it from a member of the advocacy organization Clean Water Action.

Brown's entire house smelled of feces. Tierney can't be there anymore. Brown took her to look after her neighbor. One of Brown's sons tried to help clean up, but felt so sick that he almost vomited. Her other son, Chandler, had been cleaning sewage in the basement bathroom on his 16th birthday.

It rained more than 1 1/2 inches on the backup day, breaking the rainfall record on March 24. But when Brown discussed the SOS plan with city officials, she was told that she was not eligible—DPW investigators found the root cause of interference with the main sewer and pipeline to her home.

Brown said that in her view, the city is evading accountability for its century-old sewer infrastructure. She said that her basement was never filled with sewage on sunny days—only when it rained—but the city blamed the root cause.

After learning about the new cleanup plan, Brown was hopeful about it. But she expects that most people will eventually have the same experience as hers.

"On paper, if I sit here and look at it, I will say,'Oh, this looks great,'" she said. "But once you start to read the fine print, you start to say,'Oh, this really doesn't help me.'"