Iowa family finds basement flooded with animal blood from meat locker

It sounds like a scene out of a Stephen King novel, but this was the Lestina family’s reality after finding four inches of bloody water in their basement.

The gory scene was the result of improperly drained animal blood from the meat locker next door, WIO-TV reported Tuesday. Instead of keeping all of their by-products in a holding tank, Dahl’s Meat Locker was flushing some of the blood down a floor drain.

Kaitlin Dahl, the co-owner the meat locker, said that they’re taking responsibility of the situation. They immediately stopped their kill production to install a water disposal system up to the Iowa Code standards.

However, the Dahl family maintains that they weren’t at fault because no one from the state or county ever told them they were doing anything wrong.

“We didn’t know about it and all of our inspections had passed from the sanitation in Guthrie County to IDALS to DNR,” Kaitlin Dahl told WIO-TV.

The Lestinas are still out of their house because the drainage water continues to back up.

KRDO Only 2019