Sewage Foul-Up Unreported Post Falls Officials Discount Incident, But Epa Investigating

An anonymous Post Falls employee has accused the city of tampering with sewage discharge reports and covering up problems at its wastewater treatment plant.

A mid-October mishap sent sewage 30 times more concentrated than normal spewing into the Spokane River. The event was not reported to regulators.

Plant managers also are accused of increasing chlorine levels to kill bacteria before they sample wastewater.

Post Falls officials conducted an internal review and said the complaints boil down to a misunderstanding.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating.

City Administrator John Hendrickson said there has been no health risk and said the unnamed whistle-blower is involved in a personnel dispute. He would not elaborate nor would he explain what job the individual holds.

“I could find there was no willful intent to withhold or change from standard procedure,” Hendrickson said. “I didn’t find any malicious or intentionally negligent behavior from anyone.”

The whistle-blower sent to the DEQ samples of the more than 650 pounds of sludge that was accidentally dumped into the river.

State regulators then gathered further information and found the complaints serious enough to pass along to the EPA in Seattle.

“If true, it’s definitely a concern to us,” said John Tindall, a water quality expert with the state Division of Environmental Quality. “We depend on these treatment plants to provide accurate information.”

Municipal sewage plants are responsible for monitoring their own sewage disposal and reporting them to state and federal overseers.

Future river health “is, to a great degree, predicated on the data we get from the treatment plants,” Tindall said.

The current inquiry came after a pump malfunction sent poorly diluted sewage sludge rushing into the river. The accident was spotted and brought under control in less than an hour.

Plant operators didn’t tell the DEQ or EPA of the accident. They “did not feel the problem was serious enough to merit reporting outside the city administration,” plant superintendent Allen Tudor wrote in a letter to EPA.

According to the city’s federal permit, an upset “which exceeds any effluent limitation” must be reported to the EPA within 24 hours.

Solid waste during the accidental outflow reached 1,780 milligrams per liter of water.

The city’s federal permit requires that waste not exceed 45 milligrams per liter during a weekly average. It didn’t.

The city still should have known the incident needed to be reported, state and federal officials said.

“Sometimes things that would seem logical” aren’t obvious to all, said EPA investigator Vaughn Blethen.

The DEQ monitors all significant pollutants that get dumped in the river, Tindall said. If someone had been in the water near there at the time, it could have been hazardous.

“Our concern was that there was an upset we didn’t know about,” he said.

State officials were told by the whistle-blower some biological sampling of waste “wasn’t being reported because it didn’t look good,” Tindall said.

On occasion, damaging waste samples were discounted as inaccurate by management and simply not included in reports, Tindall was told.

At other times chlorine - used to control dangerous fecal coliform bacteria - was increased before samples were taken then “turned down again,” Tindall was told.

Some of the complaints are more than a year old.

Hendrickson said some are just groundless. Others are nothing more than “a difference of opinion between an employee and supervisor about how to do a report.

“We absolutely are not interested in violating any standards,” he said.

“There have been other incidents that we have reported immediately, so nobody’s holding back.”

Blethen said Post Falls is cooperating with the investigation, which could take months.

“When it comes to public health and safety, I think - I hope - we’re all on the same sheet of music,” she said.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Craig Welch Staff writer Staff writer Susan Drumheller contributed to this report.