ST. LOUIS – A basement floor soaked with water from a sewer backup. More than a dozen Green Park residents would like to forget the grease and feces-filled remnants of a Friday afternoon.

“There was three inches of just sludge and grease and just feces everywhere,” said Greg Lico.

While cleanup and restoration crews have been diligently working in Denise Asher-Snyder’s basement on Marbob Drive, signs of destruction are easily visible.

“This happened on a beautiful day. It was, what? 70 degrees, Friday, blue skies (and) sunny. It was perfect,” Asher-Snyder said.

Denise said the fact an act of God wasn’t responsible for this damage makes it all the worse.

Up and down Marbob Drive, FOX 2 saw cleanup crews parked in driveways. 

More than a dozen residents of this Green Park neighborhood were impacted by a sewer backup. MSD says it was caused by grease getting into the wastewater line.

“An extensive amount of grease would be a good way to put it. There was a lot. We pulled about three buckets out of the 400-foot reach of the eight-inch line. That is far more than it would take to block up a line that size,” said Sean Stone, who was with MSD Project Clear.

Stone said the exact source of the grease is still unclear, but he noted that the neighborhood is just east of a stretch of South Lindbergh Road lined with restaurants.

“We’re going to be going into all those restaurants and looking at their grease systems and traps and making sure they’re clean and operating as they’re supposed to so this sort of thing doesn’t happen again,” Stone said.

Stone added that MSD will help out the residents who were impacted by the incident. 

“I don’t want to get ahead of the investigation and say what that’s going to look like right now; our focus is on making sure the system is operating as it should be,” Stone said. “We took care of that when we cleared that blockage. Finding the source of this, making sure there aren’t any other blockages around there. If we can find out who’s responsible for this, we’re going to hold them accountable in any way that we can.” 

According to Stone, the insurance company MSD works with is reaching out to residents directly.

Residents, however, want this issue to be fixed as soon as possible. 

“Hopefully they will, because they need to. This is their problem. I pay my bill on time every month. Never had a problem. You know, paying my bills. I pay my bills. This is totally unacceptable,” Asher-Snyder said.