Sewage spill into river was latest of many

This week’s discovery of an undetected raw sewage spill into the Spokane River is just the latest example of the city’s failure to stop dry weather discharges, which violate its national pollution permit, local Sierra Club members said Thursday.

The group called for better monitoring, maintenance and education, and threatened to file a lawsuit under the federal Clean Water Act if city officials don’t act fast.

“It’s ridiculous that this spill was discovered by a fisherman,” said Rick Eichstaedt, a lawyer for the Upper Columbia River Group of the Sierra Club.

The group sent a letter to Spokane Mayor Dennis Hession on Thursday, giving the 60-day legal notice required before a lawsuit is filed.

“There should be some sort of mechanism in place so that it doesn’t take people who are in the water to detect it,” added Eichstaedt.

A fisherman on Tuesday alerted health officials and a TV crew to a possibly long-running sewage spill at a city outfall near Kiernan Avenue and Northwest Boulevard.

That’s the same site where nearly 50,000 gallons of untreated sewage have dumped into the river since 2004, city records showed. In the past two years, city combined sewage outflows have sent almost 200,000 gallons of raw sewage into the river during dry weather, violating its national permit more than 20 times.

City crews still don’t know when the spill discovered Tuesday initially occurred or how much sewage was released, said Dave Mandyke, acting director of Spokane Public Works and Utilities.

“We have to go with what we can validate,” said Mandyke, whose agency must submit a report by Tuesday to the state Department of Ecology. “If we go beyond the time of notification, it’s speculation.”

Some preliminary estimates have said that sewage could have been flowing for several days, perhaps weeks.

“If it appears through the evidence that it went for several days or longer, we’re going to be very concerned,” said Len Bramble, permit maintenance supervisor for the Ecology Department.

City monitoring devices failed to detect the overflow, which occurred when a line became partially blocked beyond where a sensor was installed. Officials planned to remove one of three pipes in the area to prevent the chance of recurrence. They did not plan to move or install additional sensors, Mandyke said.

Apparently, such monitoring is not enough, said Eichstaedt, the Sierra Club lawyer. Most discharges are legal because they occur during rainstorms, when the city’s wastewater treatment plant is overwhelmed. Dry weather discharges, however, are violations of the city’s National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit.

The city’s failure to prevent the dry weather discharges is compounded by the Ecology Department’s failure to enforce penalties, he said.

The last time Spokane officials faced formal sanctions was in 1999, when Ecology fined the city $15,000 for an August dry weather discharge that dumped sewage into the river for three days.

Under the Clean Water Act, the city could be fined up to $32,500 per day for each NPDES permit violation, Eichstaedt’s letter indicated.

“If an agency is unwilling to deal with the problems, we will,” Eichstaedt said.

He called for better monitoring, better maintenance of city sewer lines and better public education about possible sewage spills. City officials said that citizen reports are a crucial part of their monitoring protocols. However, a sign at the outfall where Tuesday’s spill was discovered may have been hidden in vegetation and missing an identifying number, Ecology officials said.

But they also said improvements to the city wastewater system already have reduced the number of sewage discharges considerably. By 2017, regulations will allow only one discharge per outfall per year. Eliminating overflows completely is unrealistic, Bramble said.

“It will never happen, and you can quote me, until the cows come home,” he said. “Many of these are caused by people who lift manhole covers and put stuff in illegally.”

If the city responds quickly and properly and the problem is corrected, Ecology officials don’t levy a fine, said Jani Gilbert, the agency’s spokeswoman.

“Our interest isn’t to fine them. Our interest is in stopping the pollution,” she said.