Three Rivers City Commissioners received an update Tuesday evening from the Three Rivers Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) regarding the July 7 force main break at the Constantine Street Lift Station. The break spilled approximately 500,000 gallons of untreated wastewater from the WWTP at the intersection of Constantine Street and Broadway Street near the St. Joseph River.

Wastewater Superintendent Taylor Davis addressed the commissioners and gave a detailed explanation of the situation. “On Saturday, July 9 I was called at 6:45 a.m. and told we had raw sewage going into the river. It was down at the Constantine Street Lift Station, which is completely separate from the main break that happened over a month ago,” he said. “Around 9 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday night is when it broke. I got the call 10 hours later, I got in around 7:45 a.m., and we had dug a trench to a manhole to stop the flow from making it to the river by about 8:30 a.m.”

Davis said the reason they estimate 500,000 gallons of untreated wastewater was spilled is because it was “low-flow time.” “The Constantine Street Lift Station handles all of Three Rivers’ wastewater, it’s the low point in the city,” he said. “All the gravity goes down there. The main pipe that broke is the force main from the pump station that pushes all our wastewater to the headworks of the wastewater plant. That force main was found to be broke.”

Davis said when the crew was working this week on opening the gravity sewer, air was released from the gravity sewer coming from the northwest side of the city. This is when it was found that the gravity coming from the northwest side right next to the force main was also broken.

“On Saturday when I came in we contained the leak to the river, started bypass on all the pipes so that none were hitting the ground,” Davis said. “We ran for 21 hours Saturday to Sunday bypassing and renting pumps. Sunday we had to do more bypassing because we found there was another pipe broken, so we had to plug that one and run another line.”

On Monday they had to rearrange pumps because the crew was struggling to keep up with the flow. “Then we got help from Jones & Henry Engineering,” he said. “Davis Construction is the one doing the work on the new lift station there, and the subcontractor to them is Velting, which is the one putting in the force mains and sewer mains. We got their help to fix it.”

According to Davis, the main problem discovered since digging has been that it’s 20 feet deep, give or take. “As they found the break down there the water table is so high the silt just kept moving under the pipe, and it kept exposing it and the hole kept caving in. We fought that for four or five days, just digging, and putting rocks in to stop the silt from moving,” he said. “Two days ago we decided that the line is no longer fixable. It’s going to be replaced in the upgrade, but for the time being we’re going to put in some of the new infrastructure down there.”

Davis added, “We’re coming in from inside the building — we capped off the old one, and it is going to be abandoned, filled up, and not going to be used. We’re coming from inside the building and we are going to come up about five feet. Then we will come out of the building, bypass the whole broken section for the force main, and then come back into the old force main farther up and avoid the whole broken area.” 

Davis said crews have begun the process of filling in the hole and getting it capped. “We’re going to fix the gravity, we weren’t able to clamp it yet so hopefully that’s tomorrow morning. Once that’s done, we can fill in this giant hole that is 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide — if not wider,” he said. “We will fill that in and then we can start to fix it from inside the building and run the new pipe all the way up.” Davis said he does not have an exact timeline, but that he hopes for Friday — though he called it a “big hope.”

Aaron Davenport of Jones & Henry Engineering was in the audience Tuesday evening, and attempted to address how or why the force main broke. “I am positive that this is ultimately going to resort in some sort of insurance claim somewhere,”Davenport said.

“It would be irresponsible to speculate. The one thing I will say is that when you’re working on a river on 75-year-old infrastructure that hasn’t been touched in seven-plus decades things do happen. It was fortunate in this case that we are doing the work and there was a contractor right at hand to be able to help with this. I can tell you from other projects we are on that getting manpower and equipment available quickly to a job site right now is almost impossible. The fact that we were fortunate enough to be able to respond to this quickly with the crews that we had available was certainly a major plus.”

Mayor Tom Lowry spoke to Davis saying he should publicly address the fact the city missed the deadline for public awareness. “That was my fault completely,” Davis said. “When I got the call at 7 a.m., five minutes later I called two people at EGLE (Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy) and neither of them answered.” He said this was his first sanitary sewer overflow, then added he did not intend to use that as an excuse. “I made an error and did not contact the health department or the newspaper, which is what I’m required to do,” Davis said. “I was also notified that there’s a pollution hotline I’m supposed to call, as well.” To correct this moving forward, Davis said he will have standard operating procedures put in place which will provide direction in a future emergency situation.

“My first thought was just to contain it from going into the river, and then I worked 21 hours and by the time I drove home at that point I just didn’t think about it,” Davis said. “I made an error, I’ve gotten a lot of angry phone calls, and I’ve apologized to multiple people.”

To address the concern he has heard regarding citizens worried about the banks of the river, Davis said there really is no cleanup for that area. “If you put any chemical down and clean up any type of spill it’s near the surface water, so that’s not really required. You’re going to contaminate it with whatever you’re trying to clean,” he said. “Right now EGLE has not required any cleanup from where it spilled. Everything has been contained to an area besides the river, which you can’t go out there and clean that up. Everything that hit the ground was our property. We did not reach anyone else’s property before it hit the river.”

City Commissioner Chris Abel asked, “As far as lasting impact on the community, we’re going to continue to have South Constantine Street closed at that area until the repairs are completed?” Davis said the street would not reopen until at least Friday, stating the bypass lines are running on top of the ground and across the road making it impossible to reopen the road until the crew is finished bypassing. “I know the contractor is actively working on sourcing materials to get this thing back underground so we can open it back up,” Davenport said. 

City Commissioner Carolyn McNary asked Davis how much this repair was going to ultimately cost the city. “Ballpark we’ve heard anywhere from $120,000 to $150,000 just for the contractor doing the digging,“ Davis said. “The bypass pumping itself is right around $70,000, and that’s just renting pumps and pipes, and the manpower to put those out there. Then there’s been a couple of other small issues that have cost at least another $20,000.” 

McNary asked if that money is budgeted, or whether the city has emergency funds in place for this type of situation. “We have emergency funds,” City Manager Joe Bippus said. “Our plan from my office is we are working with the contractor to negotiate. Some of this might have been their responsibility, some of it might be the agent or the material down there. So we are working on a negotiation on that.”

Bippus said the city is also dealing with the insurance claim and has notified the insurance company of what has happened to see what they can pay to help cover it. “We do have the fund balance and have money in the balance to pay for it. We don’t have that final number, but we will be back to the commission with those final number reports,” he said.

Lowry asked once more if the expectation will be for Constantine Street to reopen on Friday, July 21. “That’s just a random hope, honestly. Don’t put a lot of weight on that,” Davis said. “I’ve been hoping every day since it started that it would be done soon. Velting works very fast once they are set. It’s just they’ve been so limited on the job site, and we’ve had problem after problem.” Davis said all the bypassing now must be moved in order to put in the new line, and he hoped that would happen on Wednesday, July 19.

“I do think it’s important to know that this happened, but the city has intended to spend billions of dollars to upgrade this whole system,” Bippus said. “We are down there purposely trying to make this great, perfect, brand new, and able to last another 50 years. It’s unfortunate we had a problem during it, but the whole goal was that we were down there to make this thing right before any of this happened.”

At-Large City Commissioner Torrey Brown asked whether a type of sensor could be installed to detect a break, therefore the city would not go 10 hours of it flowing without being aware. “I’m going to work on something with that,” Davis said. “We have that currently, but the problem is that it’s set up for the Village of Constantine’s flow and ours, and set at a certain level. Hopefully moving forward I’m going to look into having an alarm on that one (Constantine) and an alarm on this one, and then have a range so it will be detected sooner.”

Before ending his update to the commission, Davis apologized once more. “I’ve been transparent with EGLE and the health department, and none of them are coming after the city for a fine — even with my late notification. They’re just going to help educate me on when and how to call,” he said. Bippus called Davis “super responsive” throughout this crisis, saying he worked 132 hours last pay period. 

“It is a big deal. I know I did not cause it, and I’ve done the best I could to contain it and to get it fixed. I would have never made a decision to let this happen or think that it’s not a big deal,” Davis said.

Beca Welty is a staff writer and columnist for Watershed Voice.