About 150 Chickasha families were without water for several hours yesterday after city authorities declared Watson’s Trailer Park a health nuisance.

According to Chickasha Building Inspector Gene Winsett, city officials stayed late at the park with the owners to locate and correct the problem.

“Water was restored about 5:30 p.m.,” said Winsett. “The problem was that something like a sheet was flushed into the system that backed up everything. Because of the massive back up in the system, it took a while to find the clog.”

Winsett said workers worked their way through the trailer park checking manholes until the clog was located on the north side of the park.

“There was a sewer blockage at the park and there was a health hazard,” Winsett explained about the water being shut off. “This is a private sewer system and it was our responsibility under the health and building codes to turn off the water to the park until the problem was fixed.”

The sewage blockage in the trailer park resulted in raw sewage pooling up on the north side of the Furniture Gallery south of the park and then running across that store’s parking lot out onto the service road which runs parallel to Highway 81 on the south end of Chickasha.

Park Managers Jennifer and Jeremy Ibsen, who took over management of the park two months ago, contacted Roto Rooter of Norman to check out the problem.

According to Roto Rooter employees, the main trunklines in the sewage system were blocked and all of the existing manholes in the area had to be opened in order to locate the blockage. However, the manholes, which are difficult to open under normal circumstances, according to the park manager, had rusted shut, making them even more difficult to open.

“We are taking care of it. The city says it is privately owned and that we’re responsible for it,” said Ibsen, remarking that the city maintained the system until about four years ago.

The Chickasha Building Inspector posted a notice on the front door of the trailer park office advising them of “Improper sewage disposal,” and “raw sewage detected on property,” declaring the problem a health nuisance that required emergency, immediate correction of the problem.

“Nobody has any water. We have someone working on it right now,” said Ibsen about two hours before the water was restored.

A park resident who preferred not to be identified said she has smelled sewage for the last couple of days, and that she was not notified that the water was about to be shut off.

“A friend called me and told me, so I filled up all the containers I could find,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have been really upset. I’m really unhappy about this. I’ve got kids I’ve got to look out for and I have tenant rights, too.”

The Watson Trailer Park is owned by Northwind Properties of California.