COUPEVILLE – A lift station that pumps Coupeville’s sewage from Main Street east to a sewage treatment plant failed overnight last week, but county health officials say they could find no evidence of a spill.
The problem – a failed pump switch – should have triggered an automatic alarm, as well as a backup switch to keep the sewage pumping, but that alarm failed sometime in the evening of Nov. 7 or early Nov. 8, said Malcolm Bishop, Coupeville’s public works director.
With the pumps idle, the sewage slowly backed up in the sewer lines. Depending how long the pumps were off and how much people were flushing during that time, some sewage might have spilled into drainage ditches and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca at Ebey’s Landing.
The question is how much, if any, sewage spilled?
The worst-case, peak-use scenario is 55,000 gallons, about the equivalent of a large, backyard swimming pool, said Keith Higman, environmental health director for Island County.
Higman emphasized, however, that he and a colleague could not find any evidence that any sewage had spilled.
On Nov. 8, they looked in the ditch it would have spilled into and along the beach at Ebey’s Landing where that ditch leads, but they found no staining or other signs of a spill, he said.
“It didn’t appear as though it ever reached the beach,” Higman said.
The fact that sewer flows are light when people are sleeping, and thus not flushing, probably kept damage minimal, he said.
As a precaution, signs were posted at the beach at Ebey’s Landing, which was already closed because of an environmental cleanup of creosote-treated logs, Higman said.
Neither Higman, nor Bishop, nor Larry Altose, a spokesman for the state Department of Ecology, had an answer for why the public wasn’t notified.
Typically such notices are sent to the media, to spread the word.
“We agree that the media and public should be informed,” Altose said, adding that the agencies will come up with a more organized notification plan.
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
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