WHEN that big storm hit Sydney on Tuesday of last week, it didn't take long for Brian Findlay to realise it was all happening again.
All he had to do was look out from the back verandah of his Bexley home to the adjoining land owned by his son Jason and see the mad torrent of water flooding the block.
The uncovered stormwater channel that runs through the two Findlay properties was out of control.
Jason's surfboard was already bobbing in the floodwaters and two caravans were on the move.
Stormwater four metres deep shoved one caravan 10 metres into a ridge and the second caravan broke free of its mooring to float 20 to 30 metres down the block.
The cars used for spare parts were knocked about as if they were teacups as the water smashed through the timber fence and over the embankment to dissipate into Queen Victoria and Connemarra streets.
The water was mixed with raw sewage.
"It went on for hours," Mr Findlay said.
"The power of the water was so fierce that a dolphin would not have been able to survive in it."
It had happened before — on Good Friday 1998 — and caused a lot of property damage.
Mr Findlay, a builder, has been fighting and waiting since then to have Sydney Water fix the problem.
At one stage he had even offered to fix it himself — and for a lot less than Sydney Water engineers had estimated.
‘‘It is flooding because the culvert that drains our property is smaller than the culvert upstream,’’ Mr Findlay said.
The drain, built in 1938, has a cross section of 1.76 square metres, but when it runs into a culvert at the bottom of the Findlay property the capacity reduces to 1.42 square metres.
Mr Findlay said that following the flood in 1998, a consultant on flood-plain management gave the property a ‘‘very high to extreme flood hazard’’ rating and recommended urgent rectification. But nothing was done, despite a seven-year court case.
‘‘They made sure the case went nowhere so we had to settle in the end, which was very upsetting to all of us,’’ Mr Findlay said.
In the meantime, the Findlays can’t sell the block and can’t build on it.
Sydney Water offered to install a grate over the drain, which Mr Findlay rejected, as it would not eliminate the risk of further flooding.
‘‘This is a life-threatening hazard and we want it fixed,’’ Mr Findlay said.
A Rockdale Council spokesman said the council and Sydney Water each owned parts of the Cadia Street stormwater branch in Bexley, which drained water in and around Queen Victoria Street to Muddy Creek drain.
But the open channel running through the Findlay property and the immediate downstream pipe infrastructure was owned by Sydney Water.
‘‘The responsibility to undertake the maintenance and upgrade to the stormwater infrastructure on the Cadia Street branch rests with [Sydney Water],’’ he said.
Do you think Sydney Water and/or Rockdale Council should be doing more to fix this long-running problem?