Spill closes ocean

The city has hired outside consultants to determine the cause of a spill that spewed 580,000 gallons of sewage onto city streets and into the ocean Wednesday morning.

City crews worked for more than eight hours to stem the flow of sewage from the Bluebird lift station at Glenneyre and Calliope streets. Coastal waters for two miles on either side of the spill — from Crescent Bay to the north and Camel Point to the south — were closed by the county Health Department and will remain closed until the bacteria count returns to normal limits.

“We have hired the highly regarded Dudek engineering firm to tell us what went wrong and how to prevent it from ever happening again,” City Manager Ken Frank said. “We know a pipe pulled away from its fitting. The question is why.

“Two members of the firm have already been here, and we expect a report by next week.”

Dudek is the firm the city contracted to design a major overhaul of the Bluebird pump station, with construction due to start in February at an estimated cost of $1 million.

The spill will not hasten the overhaul of the pump station into which flows sewage from the north of the city and above it except Arch Beach Heights, Frank said.

“We are making some modifications to strengthen a couple of areas in the pump station,” Frank said.

A by-pass was installed by 6 p.m. Wednesday, but it caused some traffic problems on Glenneyre Street and will be relocated.

“We lost a couple of motors and we will take them out to rehab and hopefully have them reinstalled by Sunday,” Frank said.

Two new pumps are due to be installed in December, both of them immersible, which means they won’t quit even if sewage comes up around them.

Updating and rehabilitating the city’s sewage system has been a top priority on the city’s capital improvement plan.

“This incident occurred despite extraordinary efforts by the city over the last several years to improve the maintenance, operation and reliability of the city’s complex sewer system,” according to a joint statement issued Wednesday by Mayor Jane Egly and Mayor Pro Tem Cheryl Kinsman.

“Over $10 million has been spent on improvements to prevent sewer spills. In fact, a contractor working over the last two weeks just installed two new pumps and a rehabilitated motor earlier this week in the Bluebird pump station.”