Failing sewer system fouls city’s streets
Untreated sewage flowed in Opa-locka for 10 days, then city acted.
MIAMI — For 10 days, untreated sewage leaked into flooded streets in the industrial zone of Opa-locka, a nearly bankrupt South Florida city so dysfunctional it has spent the last two years under a governor-decreed state of emergency.
Each day on their way to work, hundreds of people slogged through the murky, foul-smelling water, unaware of the increased risk of dysentery, E. coli, and meningitis.
They say the city never told them the knee-high puddles were full of poop.
“It smells like (expletive). It smells very bad,” said local business owner Ali Alvarez. But that’s pretty normal, he said. Stagnant water covers the area for more than half the year due to shoddy stormwater infrastructure incapable of draining the area after it rains. Alvarez said he knew the standing water was a health risk but didn’t know the water at the time was actually full of fecal matter.
Miami-Dade County tests confirmed the early August floodwater near the pump contained 50 times the amount of fecal matter that would close a beach. (One test showed 3,450 enterococci — bacteria — per 100 ml of water. Beaches close at 70.)
“If they didn’t cordon off the area immediately, you’ve got a serious health hazard,” said Merrett Stierheim, who oversaw the Opa-locka administration on behalf of the Florida inspector general for six months in 2016 and 2017. County records suggest the city took no action at all for 10 days.
Stierheim, a Miami-Dade administrative legend, had seen this coming. In his final report before leaving his post, Stierheim predicted what he would later call a “catastrophe” for public health — the inevitable failure of Opa-locka’s obsolete sewer system after city officials squandered funds allocated to fix it.
Now, the system is too deteriorated to be patched, and the city doesn’t have the money to replace it. Sometimes it doesn’t even have enough money to pay the county for water and sewer services.
On Aug. 1, county inspectors noted the pump was temporarily turned off, causing the system to back up. Workers at the station said the pump was being cleaned after repeatedly jamming. Without an operational pump, or a system for bypassing it, as people in the mostly industrial area along Northwest 147th Street continued to flush their toilets, and rain seeped into the system, watery sludge overflowed from an unfiltered manhole in a nearby street.
“That’s raw sewage,” said Frank Rollason, county administrator and member of the Opa-locka oversight committee. It’s a problem he too had been expecting.
The sewage mixed with stagnant flood water from a recent rain, spreading particles of human waste for blocks in every direction. (A similar leak occurred in early May, according to county records. It’s unclear if the city ever disinfected the area as required under health codes.)
It seeped into several warehouses, covering ground floors with half a foot of the rank water. It stunk but many business owners in the area said they weren’t informed of the sewage leak.
“That’s what we’re looking at — the human exposure — someone walking through a puddle thinking it’s a puddle of water when it’s really not,” said Rashid Istambouli, professional engineer and senior chief of the Miami-Dade County Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources.
A sewage leak of any size is legally considered an emergency. Once it is aware of a leak, a city has 24 hours to identify the source of the problem and disinfect per state health department regulations.
Opa-locka officials took 10 days to act, according to county inspection reports. At one point, according to the records, Opa-locka officials even denied that there had been a sewage leak, despite multiple water quality tests performed by the county that proved otherwise.
Finally Opa-locka officials disinfected the water by spreading powdered chlorine in the puddles. The stagnant water went from dangerous, to disgusting but mostly harmless to human health (“mostly” because it was still a breeding ground for mosquitoes).
Then, just a few weeks later on Aug. 27, county inspectors were called back to 147th Street. This time, raw sewage was coming up through the floor of Gwen Meckler’s industrial laundromat.
It wasn’t the first time, said Meckler. The liquid bubbles up through floor drains in one of the three warehouse bays almost every time the nearby sewage pump fails, which she says has been as many as five times a month. She is the only business owner interviewed by the Miami Herald that city informed of the increased health risk at all.
“We all wear boots around here,” she said. The laundry business employs a 24-hour cleanup crew to mitigate the mess, disinfect, and pump out the water into the streets since the drains don’t work.
“The cost involved has been enormous,” she said.
Pump station 8, located near Meckler’s building, is supposed to pump sewage from that zone into main sewer lines that return the sludge to the county for processing. But pump station 8 only sometimes completes that task and has been in need of serious repairs or replacement since at least 2009, according to county records.
Alvarez says he often sees evidence of liquid bubbling up from the manholes along the always flooded streets. “On top of the water you see some bubbles like when something is fermented,” Alvarez said.
The county continues to monitor the situation, but has limited power to force Opa-locka to comply. A spokesperson from Gov. Rick Scott’s office the state would send a team from the Department of Environmental Protection to Opa-locka “to evaluate the best path forward to alleviate this flooding issue.” The timeline for that inspection has not yet been released.