A Gorham woman is seeking government intervention to prevent future flooding of her basement and yard, but her quest appears bogged down amid bureaucracy.

Carol Molchior, of 10 Lawn Ave., said stormwater runoff from an adjacent condominium development, after heavy rains last year, caused costly damage.

A ditch, she pointed out, under the border fence provides an outlet onto her property and she discovered a town plan that shows it’s a spillway into her yard. “That’s trespassing,” she said, and added there’s no easement for one in the title to her home.

She said the town allowed the spillway to happen and she wants it off her property. “It’s unacceptable. The town is not addressing the problem,” she said.

Cost for a project to pipe runoff water across her property to a catch basin on the street would be an estimated $8,000 that she shouldn’t have to spend, she said. “We’ve been totally ignored” by town officials, Molchior said in an interview in her home.

Seeking a solution, Molchior has reached out to various town officials and even ratcheted her complaint up to the state level. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection visited her property last month.

“So far, radio silence from town and state, apart from DEP saying they don’t document their inspections,” Molchior said in an email May 12 to Westbrook-Gorham Now.

The condo project received Planning Board approval in 2017. Molchior bought her home in August 2023, just months before a flooding issue surfaced. “The most damaging flood to my basement was on Jan. 10, 2024 — two feet of water,” she said. “The street was a river of water.”

She paid to have a second sump pump installed. “The next big flood was on March 10, 2024 — one foot of water,” she said, with the two sump pumps in operation.

She has shelled out $6,000 for repairs in her basement.

The recent rains, Molchior said this week, were not long enough or heavy enough to overwhelm the sump pumps. “So just basement puddles, but there will be bigger rainfalls again,” she said.

Other Lawn Avenue neighbors, she said, have also experienced flooding. Two that Westbrook-Gorham Now contacted did not return recent email messages seeking comment.

Town Manager Ephrem Paraschak also did not return an email April 28 seeking comment about Molchior’s complaint.

Robert Wood, of the Maine DEP, accompanied by two department stormwater experts April 15, saw her property for themselves. Wood did not return an email request for comment about when he expected to issue any findings.

In a letter to Wood on April 16, Molchior asked for action to be taken. “There’s no legal or environmental basis for discharging unfiltered pollution into anyone’s backyard,” she wrote.

This story was updated to correct the spelling of Carol Molchior’s name.