South Austin resident says Google Fiber project causing problems in neighborhood

When Rachel Diaz turns the faucet on in her bathroom, not much happens. As of Monday afternoon, she didn't have water.
  
She says MasTec, the company contracted by Google to install "Google Fiber" is responsible for that.

"We almost had our gas line punctured, we have now had plumbing issues, they have severed our water lines in which the city had to come out.  We have been out of water for 2 days," Diaz said.

Diaz says she lost water Saturday night.  She says the city came out the next day and told her this:  "MasTec has built trenches around your meter box, which with the rains caused your meter box to collapse," she said.

When we interviewed Diaz Monday afternoon she was still waiting on a plumber to fix a problem she feels MasTec and Google should be fixing anyway.

And that's not all.

Diaz says she's lived on Palo Blanco lane for 25 years and it's never flooded like it did this past Halloween.

"We had to pull up all of our carpet, we lost a lot of personal items, lost our garage door, all our doors," she said.

Diaz thinks the Google Fiber project is affecting the drainage in the area...causing flooding in the neighborhood on Halloween.

"All of our manholes are blocked, all of the gutters are blocked and MasTec is the one who blocked it all," she said.

We contacted the City of Austin Watershed Protection Department.  They said with all of the rain Central Texas got this Halloween, many areas in the city flooded that haven't flooded before.

Diaz is hoping Google, Mastec and the city will make sure this doesn't happen again.

"There should not be all of these issues.  If I'm having these problems that means everyone else is having these problems.  Why isn't the city looking into all of these issues with MasTec?" Diaz said.

We did speak with the City of Austin.  They said since February, they've been tracking 3-1-1 complaints about the Google Fiber construction.

Since February they've received 236 calls.