After Family's Unfathomable Sewer Fiasco, a Light Shines

On the day raw sewage belched from the drains of her family’s Rochester Hills home a second time during a month of freakishly redundant road construction bumbles, Mary Penberthy stood in line at her neighborhood Panera Bread store and wept.

She awoke that morning to an urgent note her husband, Philip, had taped to the toilet in their 88-year-old family home: “Don’t flush!”

It not only fouled up that delicate matter, but everything else during those minutes between getting up and getting to her job at a dental office in a fashion that didn’t betray that she was living in a sort of suspended reality.

What was this, this some sick kind of déjà vu? A kick-’em-while-they’re-down, one-two-three punch? A test of how much stress and chaos a person can take before she loses it in the fast-food line?

“There I was, crying in line, thinking, ‘This has gotten to Biblical proportions. This is insane,’ ” Penberthy told Patch. “ ‘I can’t eat breakfast because I can’t go to the bathroom. I can’t take a shower.’ I’m thinking, ‘it’s been one thing after another, after another, after another.”

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Last June, a contractor’s crew working on Rochester Hills’ Hamlin Road widening project hit a sewer line on the Penberthys’ property. The break caused an impressive gusher that spewed putrid, brown water from basement floor drains with such force that it measured a foot-deep by the time the eruption quieted.

A month later, the contractor hit another line, this one flooding the garage with water. At least that was clean water, but that’s where the family moved belongings that hadn’t been soiled with sewage.

And then the next day — the very next day — a third construction mishap caused filth from the sewer to once again bubble up in the Penberthy home.

The family raced against the summer heat to dry out the items they’d salvaged before mold began to grow. They ripped out drywall. While money from the insurance settlement held out, they did what they could to save the home where Philip Penberthy had grown up and where he and Mary have raised their own children, Michaela, 21, and Cavanaugh, 16.

Related

• Family Displaced by 2 Sewage Backups, Flood Sues
• Temporary Relief Denied in Massive Sewer Backup

Their home uninhabitable, the Penberthys have been living in a two-bedroom hotel suite for the past three and a half months while their lawyers and the city’s lawyers sort out legal liability in a stormy court battle. The city is paying for the temporary accommodations after Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Martha Anderson allowed that as an alternative to delaying the Hamlin Road project.

Timothy S. Ferrand, an attorney for the city, told The Detroit News earlier this fall the city “has gone out of its way to help the family” and is sympathetic to their situation, but their lawsuit should be against the contractor, not the municipality.

“There is a claims process and due process that they seem to want to go around,” Ferrand said.

In the most recent legal skirmish, a judge rejected the Penberthys’ request for temporary relief.

“This process,” Penberthy said, “it wears you down.

“As my husband put it, it felt like we were under assault. After they hit the water main, nothing happened in terms of the city paying for the cleaning. Two companies could have, but we couldn’t come up with the funds to keep them going. We can’t get home equity loans because the house is uninhabitable. We’re living on credit cards.

“You feel like there’s no point out there that you’re moving to, because everything is up in the air all of time,” she said. “There’s no end in sight, or knowing when we will be getting back into our house.”

Groundswell of Support

Then, little things began happening that, added together, became a very big, wonderful gesture with near perfect timing.

One by one and then in groups, people the Penberthys have never met began stepping forward, sympathizing, empathizing and offering to help.

When he heard they had been denied temporary relief, Rochester Hills resident Chris Gordon thought about all the Penberthys had lost and all they didn’t have, like winter coats, as they head into what can be an unforgivingly cold Michigan winter. A crowdfunding campaign he started has raised almost $1,500 to help out the family.

“I read it and thought, ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ ” Gordon said in an interview with Patch. “They are in the middle of a quagmire, still living in a hotel, and it’s all just too much.

“I’m a Christian,” he said. ‘It’s my faith. I couldn’t consciously have a good night’s sleep knowing that no one is trying to help them — that I was aware of, anyway. I just felt compelled to do something.”

Gordon didn’t know it at the time, but Kim Barno, who lives about a mile away, was thinking the same thing.

“I’ll tell you, up until this incident, I couldn’t tell you who the Penberthys were, but after seeing this on The Detroit News, my heart was breaking. This could be any one of us,” Barno told Patch.

Barno read about Gordon’s GoFundMe campaign and introduced herself. She told her friend Pablo Fraccarolli, about it, and he wanted to help, too.

They began talking about ways they could support the family, and came up with a plan for a work day and rally at the Penberthy home Saturday morning. The idea is simple: Show up at the family’s acreage at 674 W. Hamlin Road in Rochester Hills Saturday morning prepared to move furniture from a storage unit to the garage.

Bring your brawn and your heart.

“Charity begins at home, in the community,” Barno said. “When someone needs some help, that’s what you do.”

That makes Mary Penberthy cry again.

“It reinforces my faith in my humanity when there are people like Chris and Pablo and Kim, who just want to do this because they feel terrible, because they know it could have happened to anyone, and that they could have been us,” she said. “It brings tears to my eyes and warmth to my heart. They have no agenda, other than they just care.”

If You Want to Help

What: Work day and rally to support the Penberthy family.

When: 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 21. Be sure to dress warmly and bring work gloves.

Where: 674 W. Hamlin Road (east of Livernois Road, west of Crestline Drive, parking available on-site)

Why: “Our community is banding together by donating time and money to help the Penberthys start to get their lives back together,” the organizers said. “The family needs some extra hands to move some household items. With the help of the community, in time, they will be able to resume some sense of normalcy.”

More Information: Go to the online invitation.

Penberthy is eager to meet her family’s new friends, and enjoy the comaraderie of community. Many of the people she’s heard plan to turn out are strangers, and she has talked to some only a few times by phone. It will be nice to finally be able to match faces with voices, she said.

“There are so many little impacts here, and alone they aren’t a big deal, but when you add them all together,” she said, pausing and then adding, “I just feel grateful.”

Kim Barno marvels at the timing — kismet in the Thanksgiving season of home and hearth, at a time the world has been set on edge by terrorism. It could be the community needs to come together as much as the Penberthys need its support.

“With everything going on in the world, this is just something we can all do that is small and simple,” Barno said. “Things don’t have to be big to make a big difference.”

» If you’d like to give to the GoFundMe campaign, click the link below.

» Below, watch an interview with Philip and Mary Penberthy on WXYZ-TV