A STEADY STREAM OF SEWAGE
Pipe repair will stanch stench on Nantucket
Two million gallons of raw sewage has spewed from a broken pipe into Nantucket Harbor, with the equivalent of an Olympic swimming pool of feces-tainted outflow expected to surge into the ocean every day until it’s fixed, a town public health official said.
The sewage main in the town’s center is believed to have ruptured Thursday evening after frigid early-week temperatures jumped to 40 degrees during the snowstorm, then quickly back to sub-freezing levels, Nantucket Health Department Director Roberto Santamaria told the Herald.
“The snap freeze may have broken the pipe,” Santamaria said, counting on diagnosing the cause more exactly once crews can reroute the sewage with a bypass pipe and then dig up and replace the ruptured sewage main in the coming days.
Santamaria said the damaged main has drained 2 million gallons of sewage and other water that flowed into the sewage system after Thursday’s snowstorm and set a historic high-water mark — amounting to just over three 660,000-gallon Olympicsized swimming pools.
Santamaria estimates most of the island’s 750,000 gallons of daily sewage is currently spilling from the sanitation system, though tanker trucks are transporting some of it to the island’s treatment plant in the hopes of reducing the spillage.
For now, the town has diverted all the spillage to one point in the harbor: a pipe near the Nantucket Yacht Club.
Crews worked into the night Friday and were back at it again early yesterday to stanch the stenchy flow. A Coast Guard tug broke up ice in the harbor yesterday morning to clear a path for a Steamship Authority ferry that was carrying essential tools and repair items needed to install a pipe to bypass the broken main.
Santamaria said the bypass should be installed by the end of the day today, but only a full repair will stop the sewage spill — and that’s expected to take a few days.
A bit of good news, Santamaria said, is the dangerous bacteria in sewage needs warmth to survive, so the cold should kill off the worst of what’s in the spill. Still, he said, the state Division of Marine Fisheries closed the harbor to fishing and a full review of the spill’s impact will be conducted to determine the environmental impact.
Nantucket Selectman Matt Fee said he’s thankful the spill happened during the slowest time of the year for the island.
“I can’t imagine if this happened in August or September,” Fee said. “The timing could have been a lot worse.”