Sewage seeps up
‘Disgusting brown river’ floods streets and driveways in Fort Lauderdale neighborhood
FORT LAUDERDALE – The never-ending water woes plaguing Fort Lauderdale hit Rio Vista on Tuesday, leaving a toxic mucky stench in the driveways and streets of one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.
Bill Scherer, a high-profile attorney whose Rio Vista home sits just a few blocks from the flood zone, described driving through a smelly “brown river” on the way to the airport Tuesday morning.
“It was horrendously disgusting, I can tell you that,” he said. “I saw the sewage pouring out onto the streets. Unbelievable.”
City officials suspect the 54-inch sewer main that began spewing raw sewage Tuesday sometime after 10 a.m. was not ruptured by a construction drill but by fatigue from nearly 50 years of use.
“We don’t know what caused the break,” Mayor Dean Trantalis said. “Could be pipe fatigue. The pipe has been there since the 1970s.”
Hundreds of residents have been affected by this latest sewage pipe catastrophe, the mayor estimates.
Commissioners just last week approved a $19 million project to replace that section of pipe. But after years of neglect, it was a move that came too late.
On Tuesday morning, city crews began working to shut down the pipe and seal the leak, but the sewage was still flowing hours later.
was unclear how many gallons of raw sewage had been spilled into surrounding streets and the nearby Tarpon River, Trantalis said.
City officials, who are required to report sewage spills to the state, estimated that more than 100,000 gallons of raw sewage has been spilled since the break was reported Tuesday morning.
If all goes well, an emergency contractor will pinpoint the exact location of the break and complete repairs overnight, Trantalis said. But the cleanup likely will take several days.
Drinking water has not been affected by the leak, but city officials are warning people not to swim, fish or jet ski in nearby Tarpon River.
For the next 24 hours, residents throughout the city can help stem the flow of sewage by flushing their toilets less and not running their washing machines or dishwashers, the mayor said.
Fort Lauderdale water customers have endured a series of boil-water orders in recent months as city officials struggle to patch the system’s aging pipes.
In January 2018, city officials agreed to borrow $200 million to help fix the failing water-sewer system. The vote came after several years of streets, yards and waterways being polluted with the contents of Fort Lauderdale toilets.
But a 2017 report placed the fix for the water and wastewater systems at $1.4 billion.
Longtime Rio Vista resident Strawn French said he alerted city officials about
Tuesday morning’s sewage leak after walking out to seal his driveway and being hit with a horrible stench.
The break, which occurred near the 1000 block of Ponce De Leon Drive, forced city crews to close the road from Southeast Ninth Avenue to Southeast 12th Way.
“The street, the sidewalk, the roads are all flooded,” French said. “The neighbors are driving through not knowing what they’re getIt ting into. It’s just bubbling up profusely from the street. And the tragedy is it’s all going into the Tarpon River.”
Trantalis said it was too soon to say what environmental impact might have been caused by the spill.
“We’re trying to contain the impact on people, wildlife and landscaping,” he said. “We’re doing our best. We’re on top of it.”
City crews were using sandbags and vacuum pumps to keep the dirty water from spreading its stench further through the neighborhood.
In January, a sewage spill caused when a contractor broke a 42-inch wastewater pipe in Pompano Beach overwhelmed nearby canals with human waste.
The sewage flowed for six days through a pipe 17 feet underground, killing fish, frogs, iguanas and even a manatee.
In all, 52 million gallons of sewer water escaped into the waterways, the largest spill on record in Broward County.
The mistake is costing the contractor $200,000 in state and county fines.
Christina Currie, president of the Rio Vista Civic Association, got an email from a neighbor Tuesday morning warning her there’d been a sewer spill near Hector Park. So she got in her car and drove over to check it out.
“It smells horrible,” she said. “You can see water gurgling out from Hector Park all the way to people’s driveways.”
In December 2016, a sewer line break sent 2.5 million gallons of raw sewage through the Tarpon River neighborhood, spreading toxic waste through people’s yards just eight days before Christmas.
It was the city’s fourth major sewage spill that year. Earlier ruptures dumped 10.6 million gallons of sewage into the Himmarshee Canal, 4.1 million gallons into George English Lake and 2 million gallons onto the 500 block of Northwest Fourth Avenue.
But Tuesday’s sewage spill was a first for Rio Vista, Currie said.
“It’s never happened in this neighborhood before,” she said. “We know the city has ongoing problems, and we’re not shielded from that. It could happen anywhere. So it is what it is.”
Commissioner Ben Sorensen, whose district includes the Rio Vista neighborhood, also rushed to the scene after hearing from neighbors.
“I was standing in raw sewage,” he said of his foray into the flood zone. “The sewage is flowing through Hector Park. It’s in the streets, on driveways and it is going down storm drains that do flow into the Tarpon River.”
Residents can get updates by calling Fort Lauderdale’s emergency hotline at 954-828-8000.