Orlando apartment sewage often floods Urban Trail
The Gallery at Mills Park apartments’ private pump station has spilled raw sewage several times during the past two years into a neighborhood, lake and across a public trail.
Flows have crossed Orlando’s Urban Trail – where visitors have jogged, walked dogs and pushed strollers unknowingly through the mess – and continued down the residential South Lake Formosa Drive into Lake Formosa. The most recent was last week, with an estimated 4,000 gallons escaping from the pump station.
“I have nightmares about this thing,” said Peter Collins, managing principal of Forge Capital Partners, a commercial real-estate investment company based in Tampa and a board member for the Mills Park Commercial Owners Association. We’ve spent $80,000 on this the past year. I’m on edge whenever the phone rings.”
The multistory Mills Park complex is part of a relatively new commercial district anchored by The Fresh Market near Mills Avenue and Virginia Drive and a short distance south of the city’s Loch Haven Park.
“It’s a different thing every time. One time is a hurricane, another time is when Orlando had the coldest day on record and there was a voltage irregularity that fried the electronics in the lift station,” Collins said. “This isn’t a dereliction issue or a malfeasance issue. It’s not an issue of spending money. It’s not an issue of us spending time. But it’s terrible. When a spill happens, it goes
down the street, the neighbors are impacted, the lake is impacted.”
Collins said next steps include installation of upgraded pumps, more valves designed to lessen shocks from air trapped in sewer lines and diagnostic electronics to pinpoint root causes of any future releases.
The apartment complex’s pump station sends sewage under pressure through a 6-inch pipe to a larger, pressurized sewer pipe that belongs to the city of Orlando.
The troubles apparently began in 2017 with a Hurricane Irma power outage that resulted in a big release; the storm also triggered overflows from sewage plants and pump stations statewide.
Since then, however, Mills Park spills have resulted from a variety of failures, including lack of structural support for a pipe, a “water hammer event,” and breakage of a newly installed sensor, according to a July evaluation report by Kimley-Horn and Associates.
About a dozen homes line the 500 feet of South Lake Formosa Drive where spills have flowed along driveways and gutters to a drain leading to the lake.
“It happens every couple of months on bright, sunny days,” said Dawn Henderickson, whose home fronts the spill path.
At first glance, the flow looks like water, as if from a broken sprinkler, Hendrickson said, but with closer inspection the look and odor convey a different source: “It’s gross.”
She has tried to warn people from walking through it, sometimes barefoot and often with dogs. “They don’t know,” Hendrickson said.
Bob Nelson, who lives across South Lake Formosa Drive from the apartment complex’s sewage-pump station and has a direct view of spills and responses, said users of the Urban Trail often don’t believe his warnings about why the pavement is wet.
“When you tell them it’s sewage, they say it can’t be because that would be illegal,” Nelson said.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has been notified of six spills, beginning with the one triggered by Irma, spokeswoman Ashley Gardner said.
Records, however, may be spotty. The Kimley-Horn and Associates report notes a spill in the summer of 2014, a little more than a year after the pump station began operating. The Kimley-Horn investigators suspected the cause of that spill to have been a power outage.
Bob Nelson also suspects other spills have occurred beyond the six logged by the Department of Environmental Protection.
The department in September fined Mills Park Commercial Owners Association $3,500, an amount that includes $3,000 in civil penalties and $500 for investigative and administrative costs. The spill last week may result in another fine, Gardner said.
Gardner said also that the department wants the Mills Park owner to investigate whether performance of the city’s sewage system is contributing to causing the spills.
“We are going to spend several more thousand dollars on Kimley-Horn to figure out what happened this time” with last week’s spill, Collins said.
Spills typically are cleaned up by a crew using spray cleaner, fresh water and a powerful, truckmounted vacuum.
Nelson said a crew usually arrives an hour or two after the spill is over and to clean the Urban Trail, street surfaces and gutters. By then, the sewage has flowed into Lake Formosa or into grassy areas that aren’t cleaned up, he said.
The city has posted warning signs after some spills but not soon enough, Nelson said.
From his read of the Kimley-Horn report and from talking to incident responders, Nelson thinks the city, state and apartment-complex owner can share in blame for spills occurring repeatedly.
Having little confidence that the pump station won’t fail again, Nelson also thinks the flow path should be diverted directly to the lake through an existing storm drain, rather than exposing property and people to the raw sewage as it takes a meandering route to Lake Formosa.
Short of that, Collins said the sensitivity has been increased for alarms in a pump station with a record of failures beyond his company’s experience.
“We are a development company and we’ve developed all over the Southeast — apartment complexes, shopping centers,” Collins said. “We’ve installed lift stations in numerous developments. When a hurricane happens, yeah, they go bad, but outside of a hurricane, they are pretty reliable.”