A sinkhole behind Terese Taylor's East Houston home has been swallowing ground and filling with sewage for months, and she says city crews keep showing up to drain it without ever actually fixing it. Taylor lives in a neighborhood off Mesa Drive where, she says, neighboring sewage lines are dumping into her backyard and carving out the hole beneath her property.
Most homes in Taylor's neighborhood were built in the 1950s, with sewer lines running behind the houses rather than along the street, according to FOX 26 Houston. Taylor told the station the trouble traces back to a change the city made to her own plumbing: she says crews moved her sewer line last year to reconnect it with the main line out front, and that work is when the problems with her yard began.
Daily Visits, No Fix
Taylor says city employees come out to her property every day just to drain the sinkhole, but the underlying problem hasn't gone away. She has pushed the city to address what she describes as neighbors' sewer lines dumping into her yard, yet says officials told her they don't even know how many homes are draining into the space behind her house.
Taylor shared a batch of 311 email responses that paint a confusing picture of where things stand. Some of the messages told her crews would be out the next day, while others claimed the problem had already been resolved, the station's report notes, even as the sinkhole remained.
Flooding Keeps Family Away
Rain makes things worse, Taylor said. “The smell is bad if it rains, and it floods. The water goes all the way up to where the truck is, so we can't even come back here,” she said, describing a yard that is also sinking further over time. Taylor did not mince words about her frustration with the ongoing situation, calling it “deplorable.”
A Houston Public Works spokesperson told FOX 26 he expected to have answers early the following week, but as of the station's report, no resolution had been confirmed. Houston Public Works has separately said that problems with private wastewater pipes, which typically run closer to the home, fall under the homeowner's responsibility — though it isn't established whether that applies to the lines involved in Taylor's case.
Not an Isolated Complaint
Taylor's predicament echoes other sewage and sinkhole disputes that have surfaced around Houston in recent years. In Meyerland, a resident told Click2Houston that crews repeatedly pumped and cleaned a sewage overflow only for it to return the very next morning. In that case, Houston Public Works said construction crews had poured concrete into a wastewater line along Manhattan Street, blocking the system and triggering the backups, and the agency later proposed installing a new manhole and an 18-inch wastewater line as a permanent solution.
Other Houston sinkhole complaints have dragged on for months without full repairs. Businesses near the 6200 block of Industrial Way in the Second Ward reported multiple roadway sinkholes, with resident Douglas Hargrove telling ABC13 the first one opened in February before three more followed. The city said it installed a metal plate to address the immediate safety issue while it coordinated with Union Pacific to sort out responsibility. In a separate 2021 case, a Houston family told Click2Houston that a front-yard sinkhole grew from roughly basketball-sized in May to about half the size of a sedan, and that the problem returned worse than before even after what the city's Public Works Department considered repairs.
For now, Taylor is left waiting on the same kind of follow-through those other Houston residents described, hoping the public works spokesperson's promise of answers translates into an actual fix for the ground sinking behind her home.
