City taking measures to avoid future spills

By Mindy Honey
Society Editor
Originally published Nov. 14, 2009

Branson officials said while incidents like what happened last week when thousands of gallons of sewage spilled from a lift station are not completely avoidable, they are taking measures to reduce the risk.

Last week, a lift station near Missouri 165 failed, causing 12,000 gallons of sewage to spill out an into a tributary of Fall Creek, an incident Branson City Administrator Dean Kruithof described as “very serious.”

“Any time there is any type of raw sewage spill that goes into our environment, especially as we are talking about protecting our environment and sustainability, it is a critical issue and an important issue,” Kruithof said.

He said in any type of sewer system in the nation, failures do happen.

“It is unfortunate,” he said. “It is part of the system. What we try to do is work to try to make sure that doesn’t happen often and when they do happen, they happen rarely and they are relatively minor.”

According to Utilities Manager Mike Ray, just after midnight Nov. 4, during a routine lift station check, a public works employee found lift station No. 17, near Fall Creek Road and Missouri 165, had failed. Ray described the station as a “booster station.”

“This is the final station for all of the water that is conveyed from the southwest corner of town over the ridge into the Cooper Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant,” Ray said.

When the employee arrived around 12:20 a.m. to check the lift station, he noticed the parking lot was wet.

“He checked the control panels and all the power was off,” Ray said.

He said the employee was able to shut down the station and found that a control circuit had tripped.

“We later discovered what caused that was a malfunction in the discharge pipe of one of the submersible pumps had sprung a leak and had sprayed water against a flow switch that was in a wet well and broke it loose and that switch pulled in a pump and caused an electrical short and tripped the breaker,” Ray said.

When that happened, the alarm notification circuits and pump control went out.

“So, there was no notification over our alarm system,” he said.

It was estimated that the lift station was down about three hours before it was discovered, however they estimated that sewage spilled out for only 15 minutes because of storage space at the station.

“After everything was set up and going, we did an evaluation of the creek,” Ray said. “There was no damage to aquatic life. Everything was still alive.”

City employees drew samples from the creek both last week and again this week.

Ray said tests found elevated fecal counts the morning of the spill below the lift station. The test showed a fecal colony count of 20,000 per 100 milliliters last Wednesday. On Monday, the test revealed a fecal count of 350. Ray said they are allowed a fecal count up to 400.

“A normal fecal count in a creek would be 50-200,” he said.

The incident is something they do not want to have repeated.

New battery backup, monitoring and control components have been installed to provide additional assurance of alarm reliability in the event of electrical failure.