Last December 3, with rain pouring and the Meadowbrook Pond across the street rising, Joseph Geraci heard a burping noise coming from his sewer line. The next thing he knew, sewage was backed up through a drain in his basement. Down the street, at Byron Vannoy’s house, sewage came up through a basement toilet and flowed down the hall, soaking the carpet and walls.

The same thing happened at Don and Barbara Harmon’s house. But the sewage seemed like a bigger problem than just rain, Don thought. He claims that debris blocked a drainage system that should have directed storm runoff away from the main sewer lines. Instead, Harmon believes, the storm water backed up into the sewer lines, pushing waste into the homes surrounding the pond, which sits a few blocks east of Lake City Way at Northeast 105th Street.

Harmon and his wife, along with several neighbors, filed claims with the city, asking that it pay for cleanup and the installation of basement valves to help prevent seepage in future rainstorms. All were denied. “Essentially they were saying it was an act of God that they couldn’t control,” says neighbor Ruth Neisinger.

Harmon says some people in his neighborhood hired an attorney after the storm, but he and his wife are both in their 80s and on a fixed income. Hence hiring an attorney seemed a little cost-prohibitive—so they and six neighbors joined forces. Harmon’s wife, a former legal assistant, wrote up a complaint, and the group filed a pro se (meaning they represent themselves) suit against the City of Seattle. Geraci says he heard that the county might have been responsible for dealing with clearing out the debris, so Harmon named King County Metro as a defendant as well. The plaintiffs are seeking damages between $3,700 and $80,000 apiece.

Seattle Public Utilities spokesperson Andy Ryan says the city does not comment on pending suits, but the Harmons and their neighbors were hardly alone in their fate that day. “This was the biggest storm in history,” Ryan says. “It defied everyone’s drainage infrastructure all over Western Washington.” (More than five inches of rainfall was recorded on that day alone. The average rainfall in Seattle for the entire month of December is six inches.)

Ryan adds that at one point calls were coming in to the utility at the rate of about 10 a minute. He doesn’t know how the Meadowbrook sewers backed up, but he says that normally drainage systems go from main lines into two separate systems: one that runs sewage to a treatment plant and another that sends storm water into larger bodies of water, like Lake Washington. But “when you get massive flooding,” he says, “all bets are off in terms of how the sewer works. The question is, how do we respond to acts of God as mere mortals?”