BURLINGTON, Iowa, February 24, 2008 (ENS) – The City of Burlington discharged an estimated two million gallons of untreated wastewater mixed with storm runoff water to the Mississippi River after a pipe became plugged last week.
City officials are unsure of when the discharge began, but they discovered the plugged pipe on Tuesday in the Brooks Street section of the Hawkeye Sewer System.
The line was unplugged the same afternoon, but the discharge was not reported to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, DNR, until about noon on Wednesday.
The DNR will issue a notice of violation to the city because the discharge was not reported on time. Discharges due to mechanical failures must be reported to the state agency within 12 hours of the onset or discovery of the discharge.
“If we had been notified when the discharge began or shortly after that, we could have collected and tested water samples,” said Russell Royce, an environmental specialist with the Washington DNR field office. “That would have let us know the impact of the discharge.”
“Without test results, we don’t know how much the untreated wastewater was diluted by any rain water runoff entering the combined storm and sanitary sewers,” he said.
Burlington is one of nine Iowa cities that could be sanctioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because they have yet upgrade their aging sewer systems. The federal agency said last week that the communities must separate their stormwater from their wastewater.
Burlington city officials have recently made a major commitment to update the city’s combined sewer system. City officials plan to install storage tanks at the Brooks Street section this year to prevent future overflows.
The other eight Iowa cities that have not separated their water treatment systems are Clinton, Des Moines, Fort Madison, Keokuk, Muscatine, Ottumwa, Spencer and Wapello.
Cities are reluctant to incur the enormous costs involved in these upgrades. In Des Moines, for example, the price tag for such an upgrade is $250 million. For Ottumwa, it’s $220 million.
Barb Lynch of the DNR says some grants and low interest loans are available, but residents will see higher sewer and water bills. “It’s going to take local money. It’s going to take user fees. It’s going to take state and federal money as well,” Lynch said
The EPA is asking those nine cities to make the water treatment system upgrades within the next 15 to 17 years, but the communities are asking federal officials for permission to spread the cost of the upgrades out over 20 to 25 years so residents will not be hit with large increases in their sewer and water bills all at once.
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