I
t all started Thursday when a state environmental inspector showed up at his door."We have a complaint that you've been remodeling your house, and you've been throwing construction debris in the stream and that you've cut down several trees, and you've thrown those in the stream as well," recited Long.
Following the storm, Long had to have his insurance company send crews out to remove the trees and debris.
Despite their efforts, we found one uprooted tree laying over Bread and Cheese Creek and another left protruding from the shallow waters.
Apparently, the inspector saw far more than met our eyes.
"His preliminary findings were that the resident had purposefully placed a significant amount of yard waste, debris or items that could have resulted from the recent storm we had... that they had purposefully placed that into the creek as well as the 100-year flood plain nearby," said Department of the Environment Spokeswoman Dawn Stoltzfus.
Try as we may, we couldn’t find that, but just across Plainfield Road, we spotted a shopping cart, old tires and a pile of runoff debris that may have come from shopping centers upstream along Merritt Boulevard.
"Most of the stuff along that bank is stuff that's been there since I was a child, and I'm dumbfounded," said Long.
He’s also in line to be fined, up to $10,000 per day, if he doesn’t clean up the mess, whether it’s his or not, in the next 30 days.
