By David Wilkins - Daily World Writer December 15, 1999, The Aberdeen Daily World
Serviceable system doing solid work, or leaky, sewage-spewing nightmare?
The latest salvo in the Friends of Grays Harbor's battle against the City of Aberdeen and the Stafford Creek Correctional Center finds city officials and activists once again at loggerheads.
The issue is whether the city sewer system has sufficient capacity to handle the $200 million, 1,900-bed prison that's scheduled to open in March.
The Friends of Grays Harbor mass mailed a letter to the citizens of Aberdeen the week of Dec. 8, claiming that "Grays Harbor faces the same health risks as North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd."
The Westport-based environmental activist group says Aberdeen's wastewater treatment plant is so overloaded that adding the prison to the system is "jeopardizing human health and the environment."
Aberdeen's Public Works director, Larry Bledsoe, says the city recognizes the need for a new treatment plant, but building one without correcting the problems with the city's storm sewer collection system - the major source of downtown flooding, and a perennial source of high flows at the existing plant - would be irresponsible.
The first of nine pump stations designed to combat the flooding problem was scheduled to begin operation this morning. But no real difference in the flooding problems is expected, Bledsoe says, until three other stations serving the downtown area begin operation in three weeks or so. The city is still waiting for some key electrical parts to be delivered.
In any event, Bledsoe says, the Friends of Grays Harbor letter doesn't distinguish between water coming in from storm drains and "raw sewage."
"The same health risks as North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd?" Bledsoe asks. "We don't have 100,000 pigs running loose and hundreds of feed lots that have been washed in. Fecal coliform bacteria comes from a lot of different sources. It's overstating the case."
Friends leader R.D. Grunbaum says his group is concerned because it is hearing complaints the city isn't. The Friends say they have 500 members, but according to Grunbaum, "it's not like you get a card or something. We have our standard mailing list.
"We do have raw sewage that actually does come out of the manholes and the sewer system," Grunbaum says. "One of the things that probably should be emphasized is that Aberdeen has sanitary sewer overflows." The calls are "mostly from new people who've recently moved here. We've been getting phone calls from people who have been complaining about sewer backups into the toilets, into the bathtubs and into the basements. The residents who have been living here for years are just so used to it that they stop calling the city to complain. It's just a fact of life."
Grunbaum, an e-commerce coordinator for a metals company, lives "part-time in Aberdeen and the rest of the time in Seattle." He says that adding another 3,000 users to the system in one fell swoop by connecting the prison would create a health hazard.
"Absolutely not," Aberdeen sewer department superviser Mike Myers says when asked if Aberdeen is having constant raw sewage discharges like the Friends of Grays Harbor letter claims. "We understand what the impact of untreated sewage is on a receiving stream. We're professionals, and that's just not something we do."
Bledsoe says the prison's connection to the city's sanitary sewer system is specifically set up so as not to overwhelm the existing treatment plant. Part of the Stafford Creek facility includes a 1.5 million gallon storage tank, sufficient to handle four days' worth of the projected flow from the prison.
"When they built that (tank), they made some assumptions based on the highest daily flow from other prisons, which is always in the summertime," says Bledsoe. "Under that assumption the tank only holds two days' worth. But studies show that wintertime flows from the other prisons are much lower. So you get the worst day of the winter, the biggest peak flow - say everybody out there has diarrhea - and that tank is actually going to be able to handle four days worth of waste."
According to the Public Works director, during heavy rains when an inflow of stormwater from downtown drains raises the level at the treatment plant beyond capacity, the prison connection can be diverted into the holding tank until the problem is over. Then the prison's waste can be pumped back out of the tank and run through the system.
"So you're going to ask the prisoners not to flush the toilets?" asks Grunbaum. "That's what the Department of Corrections told us. They said that during flow problems they would just restrict water use. I think that's bizarre. At the present time they're having surcharging and they're having sanitary sewer overflows, and the prison is not hooked up. How many times do we have rain storms that last more than three days? They've based these things on mathematical models from prisons in areas like Sheridan (Ore.) that just don't have the rainfall."
The numbers and design of the system, as well as the consent decree that ended the first Friends of Grays Harbor lawsuit over the prison's construction, are based on a study done by the Portland-based engineering firm of Murray, Smith & Associates in 1998. According to Bledsoe, under that study, the prison waste flow isn't a major factor in terms of impact on the treatment plant.
"Murray, Smith did the analysis and said that if you can store that (prison waste) for two days at a time, you'll be fine," Bledsoe says. "Well, we've got the capacity to hold it for four. So you have to divorce any capacity problems at the treatment plant from Stafford Creek, because they're not one and the same. If we have a problem one day, we can hold it out there and discharge it when we don't have a problem."
Bledsoe freely admits that Aberdeen's sewer system needs work, but he says the city is tackling the problems in a methodical way in order to get the most "bang for the buck."
"Yes, there are things that need to be done in our system," says the Public Works director. "Do we need to do those all before Stafford Creek comes online? No, because (the prison) isn't going to hurt us. In fact, in times when the treatment plant isn't over capacity, but the water going in is just high, the waste from Stafford Creek actually helps."
When there's a lot of water going through the treatment plant, but not a lot of suspended sediment in it, according to Bledsoe, it can be difficult to maintain the necessary balance of microorganisms in the treatment process and break down organic material.
"If the effluent gets too dilute, it's hard to treat," says Bledsoe. "Not enough stuff for the bugs to eat. I see Stafford Creek as a non-issue. Now, as to what the city should be doing, we've been told we're supposed to go out and build a treatment plant to handle the problem.
"I personally feel that's not being a good steward of public funds, to automatically take that route. Not when it turns out that the reason we need the new plant is because the flows during major rainfall events are too high. And that's where the problem with infiltration and inflow come in."
The city has identified about 300 illegal connections to the sewer system, ranging from homes that have downspouts connected directly to the sewer to basement sump-pumps that drain into a house's sewer pipe.
Two hundred of those have already been taken care of, according to Bledsoe, and the city is working on the rest.
"The reason that we would need to build new treatment plant capacity is that the flows during major rainfall events and flooding events are too high," says the Public Works director.
"You'll have flows in the winter maybe three times what they are in the summer, and during rainfall events they can go as high as nine times. It's water leaking in from different sources. So before we go out and spend a lot of money we need to see how many of those sources we can eliminate."
Bledsoe says the Friends of Grays Harbor's major concern with a city audit of the system's capacity is based on a consultant's assumption that the city's inability to eliminate those extra water sources in the past means that new efforts to eliminate them will be doomed as well.
"The consultant also said there were some unknown factors, like the effect that street flooding has on the total flow at the treatment plant," Bledsoe says. "The first time we had flooding down here on State Street, it wasn't raining that much, but we had a line that was plugged (because of a collapsed manhole cover). The flow at the treatment plant that day went up to 17 million gallons, from the usual, which is about 5 million.
"That's sort of a wake-up call. Yes, there might be problems all around town, but right down here (on State Street) there's some kind of a big problem."
Bledsoe says the main State Street storm-sewer line has never been "televised," a procedure in which a remote-controlled TV camera is fed through the line to look for damage or other problems. The city has ordered a special flotation device for a camera to have a look inside the line.
As far as the treatment plant goes, Bledsoe says even in times of heavy flow, the plant is not discharging untreated sewage into the Harbor or anywhere else.
No system is absolutely perfect, the public works director says, but Aberdeen's is far from the sewage-spewing nightmare that the Friends of Grays Harbor letter describes.
"There are times when so much goes into the treatment plant that the system just fills up," says Bledsoe. "All of our sewer manholes in the lower part of the city are bolted down, so if you have any sewage that's coming out it isn't going to be gushing out. You may get some leaking out around a damaged manhole cover, but hopefully if we can get that infiltration and inflow problem taken care of, that won't be such a problem.
"They talk in terms of all the pollutants being discharged by the treatment plant," Bledsoe continues, looking at the Friends of Grays Harbor letter. "There are different processes, different things that a treatment plant does. It will remove sediment, then it does biological treatment on the "bugs,' then you zap the effluent with chlorine to kill any harmful bacteria.
"If you get an overload situation, the removal rate of the sediment just goes all to hell, so it doesn't come out all that well-treated. But the process where you zap it with chlorine isn't affected. So you could have water there that's chlorinated, and it's not good water, but it's not packed full of E. Coli either. To my knowledge, we've never had a failure on that parameter.
"So it's oversimplification to say the treatment plant is not adequately performing and is causing a health hazard," Bledsoe says.
In the end, both sides say they want the same thing: Clean water.
"Does FOGH have a genuine concern that there is a problem? Absolutely," says Bledsoe. "And those concerns are being addressed, just maybe not in the manner or the time frame FOGH wants. But I think it's being addressed in the time frame and manner that is most cost-effective and represents the best expenditure of public funds."
Despite the rancor, Grunbaum agrees.
"The argument is "Is this how you solve it? What is the solution to that?' I believe the mayor, the City Council, Bledsoe and Myers want a sewage treatment plant they can be proud of," Grunbaum says. "The devil is in the details."
David Wilkins, a Daily World reporter, can be reached at 532-4000, ext. 123, or by e-mail at dwilkins@thedailyworld.com
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