Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pipe failure meant $12M spent trucking sewage
Line break grows into one of Fort Lauderdale’s costliest ever
FORT LAUDERDALE — The financial toll from a Fort Lauderdale sewer line break last December in the Tarpon River neighborhood has grown into one of the most expensive pipe failures in city history. The city on Thursday revealed that it has spent $11.86 million trucking sewage from one manhole to another just since June.
The Dec. 17 pipe failure took out a third of the city’s sewer system, leaving it de- pendent on trucks to help carry the liquid load until repairs are complete.
Total cost, including sewage trucking, system repairs and lawsuits: $27.1 million. To put that into perspective, that’s a little more than half the amount of Fort Lauderdale’s parks and recreation budget this year .
Mayor Jack Seiler said he can’t remember a more costly pipe failure in his tenure, but the price tag didn’t surprise him. The city is preparing to vote in January on a $200 million bond issue to pay for im- provements to its aging water-sewer system, and over time could spend $1 billion or more.
“This is a pretty monumental infrastructure project,” Seiler said. “The city’s 106 years old, so we’ve got a lot of old pipes.”
The city will continue paying for trucks to suck sewage from — and pump sewage into — manholes until at least this December, when some repairs are expected to be
complete.
“While the cost associated with these operations is significant, it is critical we continue,” City Manager Lee Feldman said in a memo Thursday.
If the city doesn’t use the trucks to carry raw sewage across town, sewage could back up in the pipes, overflow from manholes or even from toilets, officials say. The spills could threaten public health, Feldman said in his memo, or lead to fines against the city.
The financial tab will keep running. Besides the cost of more trucking, rebuilding the sewer system to replace the failed pipe is expected to cost $14.56 million.
In addition, the city has paid 38 property owners a total of $708,338 because their homes or cars were soaked. When the pipe broke on Southwest Seventh Street, 21 acres of residential homes were sopping with sewage. Another 11 claims remain outstanding, a city spokesman recently said.
In his memo, Feldman revealed the dramatic escalation in cost to truck the sewage. By early September, the trucks had cost the city $2.6 million over 13 weeks. Then Hurricane Irma struck, and the cost to prevent sewage overflows jumped. The city spent $9.2 million in the eight weeks after Irma.
Feldman said the storm dumped as much as 22 inches of rain on some neighborhoods, and at one point incapacitated all but six of the city’s 186 pump stations that are necessary to move sewage through the pipe network.
According to his memo, the first two weeks of October were the most expensive. That’s when higher-than-usual tides, or “king tides,” exacerbated the situation, allowing even more water to invade the sewer pipes. The city spent $1.7 million each of the weeks trucking sewage so it wouldn’t overflow into the streets. King tides are expected again this week.
Feldman said the city will seek reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for at least 75 percent of the Irma-related cost, or $6.9 million.
Homeowners continue to inquire when they see the trucks with their hoses dipped into manholes. The city apologized in a recent city newsletter but said it must continue.
Sometimes, a foul stench wafts from the trucks. One of the contractors, Johnson Environmental Services, describes it this way in a slogan on the side of the truck: “It smells like money to me.”
Corrine and James Saunders complained for six months about the raw sewage stench in their unincorporated neighborhood, as contractors poured it down a manhole in front of their Washington Park home. The city moved the trucks in midJune, after sewage reportedly backed up into the Saunders’ home, and the county intervened, records show.
The pipe that burst in December 2016 was one of the main passageways for sewage to reach the city’s treatment plant.
Alan Dodd, the city’s deputy public works director, recently likened the pipe system to a road network. The force mains — like the one that broke — push sewage under pressure toward the treatment plant. Smaller pipes allow sewage to flow naturally via gravity, and feed into the pressurized force mains.
Losing one of the force mains, he said, was like having Interstate 95 shut down. The pipe that broke was carrying nearly a third of the city ’s sewage, stretching from southwest Fort Lauderdale to Sistrunk Boulevard in northwest Fort Lauderdale. It’s been shut down since May.
Likewise, without the Tarpon River 30-inch force main, sewage backed up into smaller pipes, and the pressure inside the pipes grew, increasing the risk that a weak one might burst.
When it rained heavily, as it did in June and again when Irma hit in early September, rainwater infiltrated the sewer pipes. They were so full that sewage overflowed from manhole covers, streamed down public streets and pooled in yards.
There have been so many sewage spills in the past two years from Fort Lauderdale’s aging system, the state Department of Environmental Protection placed the city under a consent order, an enforcement document that lays out required repairs and sets a timeline for improvements and fines for future major spills.