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 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 sewer wastewater that got into a tributary of Mill Creek. The accident happened at a lift station near Dickinson Road and Nickell Ave., 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 onto sewage onto open ground. City workers were fixing that problem – at “galactic speed,”
Champion said – and had shut down the lift station at 406 Dickenson Road. That station began to overflow when creekwater got into a “wet well” there, 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.
