A Pennsylvania woman whose home was repeatedly inundated by a "flood of sewage" has won a round in a legal battle with the sewer treatment plant next door.

A Commonwealth Court panel gave Colleen DeLuca that victory this week by refusing a plea by the Mountaintop Area Joint Sanitary Authority to kill her lawsuit against the agency.

DeLuca is seeking monetary damages from the authority, claiming its failure to stop the repeated and very smelling flooding resulted in the de facto condemnation of her home.

The authority took the case to the state court after a Luzerne County judge rejected its preliminary objections and refused to dismiss DeLuca's suit. Instead, county Judge Tina Polachek Gartley ordered the creation of a board of view to determine how much the authority should have to pay DeLuca for the loss of use of her house caused by the five episodes of flooding. The state court backed Gartley's decision in an opinion by President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt.

As Leavitt noted, DeLuca was plagued by the unpleasant inundations between June 2006 and April 2011. They were caused by problems with the sewer plant's collection system, which runs under DeLuca's property and was plagued by clogs and at times overwhelmed by incoming waste.

DeLuca claims in her suit that authority officials knew the system couldn't handle the additional inflow when they allowed more and more properties to connect to it. By 2011, the system had about 5,000 customers who flushed in more than 4 million gallons of waste a day.

Unfortunately for DeLuca, some of that ended up in the lower level of her house and her garage. Leavitt cited DeLuca's account of how raw sewage began seeping out of the bathtub and toilet in June 2006. The flood was knee-deep, DeLuca said.

Authority officials assured DeLuca the flooding was a fluke, Leavitt noted. Then it happened again in November 2010. "The sewage was knee-deep and consisted of debris, toilet paper, prophylactics, blood and tampons," the judge wrote. DeLuca testified that she 'completely lost everything again'."

"I was in house arrest. I couldn't use the toilets, the shower, the laundry. I couldn't make food. I had to find somewhere to live with my kids," Leavitt wrote, quoting from DeLuca's testimony in the case.

DeLuca insisted authority officials knew there were problems with the system, but used her house as a "pressure relief valve" instead of fixing them.

Leavitt agreed. "Specific decisions of the authority caused the overflow events and the authority was aware of the adverse consequences of those decisions," she wrote.