State officials say they are investigating a sewage spill that occurred Tuesday afternoon in Independence, but the city’s top official in charge of sewers says officials reported the issue to the state as a matter of ethics and out of an abundance of caution.
“This is totally rainwater, snow melt, what have you that got into our system,” Dick Champion, director of the city’s Water Pollution Control Department, said Wednesday.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources sent a team from its Lee’s Summit office to check out the spill, which the agency termed 107,000 gallons of untreated wastewater that got into a tributary of Mill Creek. The accident happened at a lift station near Dickinson Road and Nickell Avenue, north of U.S. 24 and about half a mile east of William Chrisman High School.
According to officials, this is what happened: A sewer main burst about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, spilling sewage onto open ground. City workers were fixing that problem – at “galactic speed,” Champion said – and had shut down the lift station. That station began to overflow when creekwater got into a “wet well,” and city officials notified the DNR. Between 3:15 p.m. and 6:15 p.m., the station discharged 107,000 gallons of water.
“Even if it’s creek water, we’re reporting it,” Champion said.
The DNR says it considers wastewater discharges from sanitary sewer collection systems to be threats to public health and the environment and acknowledges that can involve rainwater and snow melt getting into old or undersized sewer systems.
“Ethically (we) report it to DNR, but I know it’s creek water,” he said.
Champion said a DNR team came to the site Wednesday but did not take samples.
“In my professional opinion, there is no health issue,” he said.
