Sewage spills into river

EXETER >> Technicians have contained a leak at the township’s wastewater treatment plant that spilled four million gallons of untreated sewage into the Schuylkill River Oct. 16.

Township Manager John Granger said Oct. 17 the leak was ongoing for as long as 10 hours, but the bypass put into place is now working.

“We’re back in full operation,” he said. “We’re pumping out the wet well now to try and figure out what happened.”

When the leak occurred, officials contacted the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which in turn contacted drinking water plants downstream that take in Schuylkill River water for drinking water.

The first of those is the Pottstown Water Treatment Plant in West Pottsgrove.

Utilities Manager Brent Wagner told the Pottstown Borough Authority board Oct. 16 about the notification and said the plant immediately took measures to safeguard Pottstown’s drinking water supply.

“Essentially, we increase the chlorine dosage to make sure we’re killing off any microbes that we don’t want in the water,” Wagner told Digital First Media.

“We’re also taking regular samples of the raw river water to check for any problems,” he said.

John Repetz, spokesman for the South-Central Office of the DEP, said Oct. 17 that inspectors had returned from the plant and based on the ratio of the spill to the flow on the river that they do not believe the spill poses a threat to human health.

He said the inspectors concluded that based on the plant’s average daily flow, that four million gallons of untreated sewage leaked into the Schuylkill.

Repetz said it is too soon to know what, if any, penalties or fines will be levied against the plant for the spill.

“There will be a thorough investigation and we’ll be monitoring intakes along the river before any of those decisions are made,” he said.

The Exeter Wastewater Treat-

ment Plant is set to be sold to the Pennsylvania American Water Company once the sale is cleared by the Public Utility Commission, a process which, according to Granger, will be “at least” several months.

He said Pennsylvania American officials had been in touch with Exeter about the spill and offered to help in any way they could.

“We have some great contractors we work with and we told them we have everything under control,” Granger said.

Granger also said that DEP inspectors “were very surprised at how quickly we had everything contained and under control.”