Sewage runneth over

Lightning sparked a series of unfortunate events Friday night at the Culpeper Wastewater Treatment Plant, ultimately causing 84,000 gallons of raw sewage to spill from a manhole in a wooded area nearby.

It was about 10:30 p.m. Friday when the sewer plant along Keyser Road went dark, following severe thunderstorms and significant lightning.

Almost immediately, emergency generators kicked on to power most of the plant’s equipment except for a critical generator tied to the main pump station. This particular pump handles more than 90 percent of the daily flow — between two and three million gallons per day.

Almost immediately, the town contacted Dominion Virginia Power to report the outage.

But because of apparent miscommunication, power crews didn’t show up on the scene until 12 hours later.

Pump zapped
Chris Hively, town director of environmental services, said the primary pump station’s emergency generator was struck by lightening, causing its voltage mechanism to fail. Not knowing the specific malfunction at the time, the town called Kelly Generator & Equipment out of Owings, Md. — more than two hours away — to fix the problem.

A Kelly crew arrived on scene about 2 a.m. Saturday morning, Hively told the Town Council Water & Sewer Committee Monday morning.

It was determined that the voltage regulator was damaged, but a replacement was not immediately accessible. In the meantime, at Hively’s urging, another generator large enough to power the pump station was tracked down, but it was in Richmond.

That generator arrived on site by tractor-trailer at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, by which time the pump station had started to overflow, spewing out liquid sewage across the road.

A long night
It took about an hour to install the new generator, stopping the leakage by about 11:30 a.m.

Hively said he didn’t believe the sewage overflow came in contact with any people, but that it did soak into the ground, penetrating groundwater and eventually making its way into nearby Mountain Run.

Dominion crews arrived on scene about the same time as the generator did, Hively said, nearly 12 hours after the outage was first reported.

And it wasn’t until 8 p.m. Saturday that power was back on at the sewer plant, he added.

“Kelly’s was telling us the generator was on the way and we were told by Dominion that power would be up in an hour,” Hively said. “We heard that every hour for a long time.”

Lines crossed
According to Dominion spokesman Dan Genest, an automated system took the call from the sewer plant shortly after 11 p.m. Friday.

But the call was recorded as a single outage and not “critical infrastructure” — a higher priority designation in place since Hurricane Isabel.

According to Genest, it was the town that “coded” the call as a single customer, according to Dominion’s records.

At the time, area-wide, another 271 customers at 23 work locations in Culpeper and Orange had reported power outages, he said. Since Dominion prioritizes power restoration based on areas with the largest number of affected customers, the sewer treatment plant — logged as a single customer — fell to the very bottom of the list, Genest said.

But if Dominion had known the town’s sewer plant was without power, the call would have been treated as a “critical infrastructure” outage and given top priority, he said.

Even if it had known, Genest added, restoring power to the plant would have been a tough job, as it was when Dominion crews arrived on scene Saturday morning.

“It’s a very muddy, swampy, overgrown area,” he said of the site of the downed tree on the power lines, directly above where the manhole overflowed tens of thousands of gallons of sewage.

Genest said it was so swampy Dominion couldn’t get its trucks to the site of the outage.

“A job like that takes a long time anyway,” he said. “It took from 10:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. in broad day light bringing in extra crews. Working at night in that swampy mess, we would have made some progress, but it would have been after noon (before power was restored).”

Genest agreed the situation was due to miscommunication. He noted that the town of Culpeper is now properly listed as containing “critical infrastructure” and that those in charge of such facilities have a direct line to the power company in the case of a future outage.

Genest said he had a “positive” conversation with Town Manager Jeff Muzzy about the matter on Monday.

Previously, the town of Culpeper — which runs three utility companies — was not on the Dominion list of “critical infrastructure” sites at all.

Environmental impact?
As required, the town has reported the incident to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and could face possible fines.

Mark Miller, DEQ pollution response coordinator, told the Star-Exponent Monday that sewage overflows are fairly common, occurring at least 250 times annually in the northern part of the state alone.

He did not seem overly alarmed by the size of the spill in Culpeper, saying it was a relative number.

“Some facilities discharge millions of gallons in terms of overflow,” he said of Culpeper’s 84,000-gallon spillage. “So it is not that much, but it is still a fairly large amount.”

Miller said the DEQ was still in the early stages of investigating the incident and that the town could face a warning letter or notice of violation. He said he was not yet sure of the environmental impact of the spill.

“Anytime you get raw sewage into surface water, that’s not a good thing,” Miller said.

As of Monday, the backup rental generator was still in place at the sewer plant as the replacement part for the failed generator was not yet available.

Muzzy told the water and sewer committee Monday now might be a good time for the town to purchase a back-up to the back-up generator and/or to consider extending town power to the sewer plant.