OAKLEY – At least 50 residents of an Oakley senior center are spending the night in nearby hotels after a stuck elevator call turned into an evacuation of all residents and their pets when firefighters discovered sewage leaking into an electrical room of an upstairs unit.
It’s a situation that’s not surprising but infuriating for Jamie Clee, whose grandmother lives in the community. She said she has built a relationship with most of the residents over the years after responding to calls from concerned residents about other maintenance and safety issues.
“These are all my grandparents, so I’m not just fighting for one, I’m fighting for the whole building,” she told CBS News Bay Area. “They don’t deserve to live like this. They pay their rent. They do everything they have to do.”
Residents said they could smell a stench of dark sewage mixed with gas seeping into the floors Sunday morning. They later discovered that one unit was covered in a mixture of sewage and gas flowing from the bathroom and kitchen drains.
“It makes me feel terrible,” Clee said. “They don’t deserve it just because they have a low income.”
They eagerly await word on when they can return home. They expect this to be within a day or two, but realistically they say they don’t expect this within a week.
It’s a pattern of maintenance errors that residents say has increased over the past decade. Resident Peter Bree lives in a unit above where sewage flowed from the bathroom. He said he could smell the odors from several floors up.
“We shouldn’t have to go through this,” Bree said. “We are not a commodity; we are people.”
Bree, like most residents, fears retaliation for speaking to the media, but he said he has nowhere else to go.
“I can’t afford any of the places I want to live,” he said. “This will probably get me kicked out.”
Property management company Winn did not return our requests for comment.
