Burst pipe let sewage flow into city streets
Lauderdale main broke in Dec.; June rain further hobbled system
FORT LAUDERDALE — Crippled by a major pipe break, Fort Lauderdale’s sewer system couldn’t handle June’s extraordinary rains and began to overflow.
Sewage gurgled from some overloaded manholes into the streets downtown, on East Las Olas Boulevard and in northwest Fort Lauderdale, public records and photographs show. Some flowed into storm drains, spilling into rivers and canals, the city notified state environmental officials.
As one sewage truck attempted to help, the back hatch popped open, spilling 3,000 gallons of untreated waste into the road, county environmental records say.
The skies cleared. But the sewer system remains compromised. A 30-inch sewer main that burst in December in the Tarpon River neighborhood — and was carrying a third of the city’s sewage to its main plant — still isn’t back inuse, according to records and interviews with city officials.
For now, the city’s sewer system can’t operate without the aid of vacuum trucks sucking sewage from manholes on one street, then pouring it into manholes on another.
“Even without a100-year rain or a 10-year rain or any rain,” Public Works Director Paul Berg told the city’s new infrastructure task force recently, “we are trucking sewage from one location to another until that 30-inch line is fixed.”
The unusual exposure to sewage worries some residents. Southwest 24th Avenue resident Clarence Isom complained to the county that near his home, trucks were dumping sewage in manholes — a noisy, smelly endeavor. He expressed concern about the longterm health effects The city agreed to dump elsewhere.
City officials advised in a recent public notice that standing water “may contain potentially harmful germs and chemicals,” and suggested medical attention for anyone exposed to it who suspects “illness or infection.”
The scent of untreated waste wafts from the open manhole covers, fouling the air.
“The stench coming up Birch Road and when you come out of our building is so horrific we lost our appetite and [are] not going out for dinner,” beach resident Craig Fisher wrote to city officials.
Residents were rattled by the latest in a series of city sewage calamities. There have been so many sewage spills from Fort Lauderdale’s aging system in the last two years that the state Department of Environmental Protection is working on a consent order — a document that proposes fining the city and setting out a strict timeline for system repairs.
City Commissioner Robert McKinzie said he saw sewage flowing out of manholes in his northwest Fort Lauderdale district.
“The swale had six inchesof rawsewage,” he said.
The city is in a state of emergency, declared by City Manager Lee Feldman. The June 1 declaration will allowamajor pipe project to be expedited. The city has spent $1.25 million on the sewage trucks so far.
Feldman is asking city commissioners to vote Tuesday to lay two new sewer main pipes and insert a new pipe into the broken 30-inch main, at a cost of $12 million to $14 million.
Until the repair is complete later this year, the city is at risk of more sewage overflows, officialswarn.
“We’re in the rainy season, and if we get a storm event, we’re going to repeat all of this again until that 30-inch line is in place and repaired,” Berg told the infrastructure task force June 26.
Grim timeline
The system has been hobbled since December 2016:
Dec. 17: The 30-inch sewermainbroke inthe500 block of Southwest Seventh Street in the Tarpon River neighborhood. About 21 acres of homes were flooded with untreated wastewater.
March and April: Each time the pipe was repaired and tested, a leak sprang up somewhere else in the 43-year-old pipe. “With any luck,” a city officialwrote to the county, “we’ll have the system back in service by [May] 12.”
May: After two attempts to use the pipe resulted in spills, the city decided to keep the critical link out of service. Vacuum trucks alreadywere trucking sewage fromone manhole to another. That practice continued.
June: The timing for a once-in-a-century rainstorm couldn’t have been worse, with the sewage system at just 70 percent capacity because of the broken pipe. But it rained for days. Ona single day, June 6, Fort Lauderdale was drenched with 4.78 inches of rain, more than double the record set in 1926. Stormwater entered the sewage system through cracks and gaps. The volume flowing into the treatment plant spiked 38 percent, city spokesman Matt Little said.
June 6: Sewage began to spill out onto East Las Olas Boulevard at Isle of Venice. It spilled for 22 hours, with about 27,000 gallons of raw sewage flowing downstorm drains into the Rio Grande Canal, the city reported to state environmental officials. There were three overflowing manholes on East Las Olas at the time, the city reported.
June 7: As rain continued to fall, multiple manholes spilled over. The city reported an estimate of 1,000 gallons of sewage spilled at each location, including at Solar Plaza Isle off East Las Olas Boulevard, in northwest Fort Lauderdale off Third Street and 14th Avenue, in the 2100 blockofNorthwest 24thAvenue, and at East Broward Boulevard and Third Avenue.
June 13: In an email to the county, Rick Johnson, a Fort Lauderdale utilities manager, said there were “not enough trucks to go around,” and there likely were overflowing manholes the city didn’t know about. The system strained to move the extrawater along. At one point, 53 of the system’s 186 sewage-pumping stations were working at maximum, never stopping, Berg said.
June 14: The rear hatch of a sewage vacuuming truck opened, and 3,000 gallons of untreated waste gushed into the streets, grass and swale in the 2400 block of Northwest 21st Avenue.
June 19: A manhole in Flagler Village downtown overflowed at Northeast Third Avenue and Northeast Fourth Street, spilling into a stormwater catch basin that leads to the New River. By then, the rains had stopped.
Sewage highway
The broken 30-inch pipe is one of a few major passageways for sewage headed to the citywastewater plant.
This one stretches from Sistrunk Boulevard in northwest Fort Lauderdale to neighborhoods south of theNew River in southwest Fort Lauderdale.
But the system is interconnected, like a road network, public works assistant director AlanDoddsaid. In this case, the broken sewer main is like Interstate 95.
“If 95 is closed from here to Miami, and everyone’s trying to get to Miami, they start going on the side roads,” Dodd said. “It starts getting backed up. It starts overflowing.”
The inability to use the pipe increases pressure on the other pipes, heightening the risk they will burst, Feldman advised in his memo to commissioners.
Some of the other pipes were already at high risk of rupturing, city records say.
OnFeb. 5, a cast-iron pipe from 1970 broke, for example, and 123,000 gallons of sewage spilled atNorthwest 13th Street and Northwest Seventh Terrace, cascading into storm drains that feed into the South Fork of the NewRiver, according to the city’s notification to state environmental officials.
The cause, the city said, was “the age of the pipe.”
Feldman said Fort Lauderdale isn’t unique in its crumbling infrastructure. Cities across America face hefty costs to refresh old water-sewer systems. A consultant hired by the city recently identified at least $1.4 billion in water-sewer improvements to be done. The city is contemplating howto pay for it.
Public notice
At Strada 315 condo in downtown’s Flagler Village community, Michelle Nunziata said she learned from street crews that the water streaming down the avenue was raw sewage and full of potentially dangerous germs.
She blasted city officials in an email.
“Residents are walking with their children and dogs, through sewage, oblivious that it isn’t rain water. This is deplorable! Shame on you!” Nunziata wrote in a June 20 email.
The city manager promised to notify residents better next time. In some neighborhoods, door hangers were placed. But condo residents likeNunziataweren’t individually notified.
“Every timewe do something, we learn something new we can do in its place,” Feldman said when pressed on the issue by Commissioner Dean Trantalis.
In communications to residents, the city cast the trouble in positive terms, saying it was caused by “a sewer main replacement in the Tarpon River neighborhood.” One article was headlined “City upgrading infrastructure!”
McKinzie and Trantalis asked the city to do a better job explaining what’s going on.
Since the heavy rains, the city has increased its public notices.
On June 7, the city warned residents to “avoid standing water” and said children should not play in it.
In a June 26 notice, the city asked people to cut back on the water they’re sending down the drains, to reduce the “likelihood of future spills.” The system remains too full, city officials said.
The city offered watersaving ideas. It suggested, among other things, “scrape rather than rinse food off of plates before placing them in the dishwasher.”