Oxmoor residents continue 20-plus year fight for flooding to stop

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. ( WIAT ) – CBS 42 is Your Voice Your Station.

Residents in Birmingham’s Oxmoor community continue to battle significant flooding issues. This comes after a subdivision was built above an existing neighborhood.

The neighbors say a drain at the top of a hill of the development was not properly installed. They have been in a battle with the City of Birmingham and the developer of Pine Ridge Estates for over 20 years while they continue to deal with the effects of it.

Gwen Lewis is just one of the neighbors on Ostlin Street who says she continues to deal with the impact. Her driveway is immediately at the bottom of Pretoria Street. We first met her in 2021.

“Every time it rains real, real bad, it comes into my house,” Lewis said. “Water, water, water just sweepin, sweepin, sweepin and it’s still filling up faster than I can sweep.”

She sent us a video showing when it rains, the road quickly turns into a river.

Josephine Williams was the first one to call us about this. You can see the rust on the bottom of her front door and wooden cross ties warped in front of her home she uses to keep water out.

“Every time it rain you don’t know if your house is going to flood,” Williams said. “That’s a chance you have to take.”

You can see damage on Lewis’ garage doors as well, and along her baseboards in the basement.

“It just pitiful. We can’t keep up with this,” Williams said. “Look at that door – I didn’t make that door rust. Water did it, but they don’t want to come out here and get off their lazy butt and see what’s going on out here. That’s not right.”

The neighbors filed a lawsuit against the city of Birmingham, engineer and developer of the subdivision in 2016. Beyond property damage, they cite mental duress and anguish, medical problems and being told the city had plans to fix the problem.

“You just left us hanging,” Williams said. “That don’t seem normal. It seem like they covering something.”

They said the drain and the rocks on this hill do not slow the water down enough to catch it. Plus, there’s only drains on the opposite side of their street.

“I hope they will come out here and put some drains and curbs and do what is right to these people,” Williams said. “We’ve suffered long enough. That’s not fair.”

On September 5, the court decided Williams won $180,000 plus court fees because she was the only person to show up to all of the hearings. The defendants never showed up. Neither the city nor developer responded to us in time for this story to air.

This story has been updated to reflect that the city of Birmingham was dismissed from the lawsuit.

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