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"People are like, 'The rain is coming this winter. When are you going to fix this problem?'" Walsh says. "We're going to try to do our best and that might happen in twenty years..."

"Or sooner," Jue interrupts. "It's not necessarily twenty years, but the easy solutions just aren't available."

In the meantime, residents and business owners are largely on their own in preparing for what could be a wet and stormy winter. DPW provides ten free sandbags per resident every winter, an offer met with derision from residents. "Sandbags are a bandaid on a gushing wound," Blane Bachelor scoffs.

The SFPUC is also encouraging residents to purchase flood insurance and has started a grant program to reimburse property owners for the cost of certain projects — like installing a flood barrier in a doorway or a sewer backflow preventer. Hans Art, the mechanic at 17th and Folsom, says that he worked with the SFPUC for four months to get the grant program up and running, but in the last week, he realized that he won't be able to take advantage of it, thanks to legal fine print that would require him to hold the city harmless and defend the city legally if anyone sues over his project.

According to Walsh, the SFPUC has received nine applications for grants so far, accepted two, and denied one.

"People are getting creative," Walsh says of the projects property owners are resorting to to protect themselves from sewage. She mentions one man who raised the entire sidewalk fronting his property in order to prevent sewage from flowing in from the street.

That man is Chris Hickey, and his property is at 2140 Folsom, around the corner from Art's auto shop. Hickey shows off the raised sidewalk, as well as the specially sealed garage doors he's put into the property since he bought it three years ago. After Hickey raised the sidewalk, he says, the city wanted to charge him $2,000 a year to inspect the encroachment — a charge he had to go to the Planning Department to get waived.

"You try to fix the problem to protect yourself, and then they come after you," he says.

Hickey isn't feeling particularly charitable toward the city of San Francisco today. He just received a letter in the mail, informing him that he's responsible for replacing one of the trees that line his portion of the block. What happened to the tree?, I ask.

"It washed away in the flood."

Californians are used to living on the edge. This is a state where people dig foundations on active fault lines; where homes perch on oceanside cliff tops; where wildfires sweep through the state on a yearly basis; where an earthquake-vulnerable liquefaction zone susceptible to sea level rise is deemed an appropriate place to build hospitals, condominium towers, and a professional basketball arena. We watch movies about the disasters we anticipate, and then head home to the communities we've built in defiance of the disasters we know will one day transpire.

We build anyway. We take the risk.

When you talk to the SFPUC about the flooding at Cayuga or 17th and Folsom, they treat it like any other risk of natural disaster. The homeowners, they say, have to be responsible for their properties — which are at risk of flood. "No one can say to anyone's face that we can design a sewer system that will handle every single storm of every single intensity from now into the future," says Tyrone Jue.

"The city can't be responsible for every flood," he adds. "Anything that we're going to do from this point forward has to be considered a partnership. You can't just assume someone else will take care of it for you. No, that's not how anything else works."

This might make sense if the flooding that residents at Cayuga and 17th and Folsom are experiencing was in fact a completely natural disaster. If those property owners had chosen to build at the equivalent of a quickly eroding oceanfront cliff, few would expect the government to swoop in and buttress their foundations.

But the homes and businesses on 17th and Folsom and Cayuga aren't on the edge of a cliff. Instead, they're in the middle of a convergence of decades of decisions made by municipal engineers, city planners, and politicians.

Gravity might make water flow from Glen Park to Cayuga Avenue, but gravity isn't responsible for that water including an unholy mix of feces, bathwater, urine, restaurant grease, used condoms, and toilet paper. Every single person who flushes a toilet and expects not to have to deal with it later — every single one of us — is responsible for that.

Standing outside of her home of 50 years with her son Michael, Victoria Sanchez says she has little hope that the city will actually fix the problem. She can't even get a city worker to come out and clear the catch basins of leaves, she says, let alone fix the entire sewer system.

And with winter coming, she is fearful for what El Niño will bring.

"They say, oh, it's an act of God," Mrs. Sanchez says. "No. It's the plumbing. It has nothing to do with God."