Heavy rains cause Mount Olive sewer spill
By Steve Herring
Published in News on September 23, 2014 1:46 PM
MOUNT OLIVE -- Building enough pumping capacity into the town's sewer plant to handle the 7.5 inches of rain that fell over a 36-hour period earlier this month would be the equivalent of the town buying six snowplows on the off chance the area could be hit by a blizzard, Town Manager Charles Brown said.
The unusually heavy downpour simply overpowered the plant's pumps and its bypass system, resulting in an about 96,000-gallon sewer spill at the wastewater treatment plant.
The 7.5 inches that fell between Sept. 7 and 8 caused the sewer overflow at a manhole located inside the wastewater treatment plant. The overflow ended midnight Tuesday, Sept. 9.
Brown said precautions were taken by activating all bypass pumps and pumping to the plant's holding basin, but that the flow so far exceeded the design capacity of the plant that the excess could not be contained.
No residential areas were affected by the spill.
It is not clear how much, if any of the pill reached the headwaters of the Northeast Cape Fear River.
However, state law requires that the spill be reported.
The town has begun a preliminary look at upgrades to the sewer plant, but even then it would still not be practical to add in enough pumping capacity to handle such an unusually heavy load, Brown said.
The town board has adopted a resolution announcing the town's intent to apply for funds to make the improvements even though specifics have yet to be announced.
"This is just the beginning stages," Brown said. "We are sort of reaching the point our trees down there (on the land application field) are six years old now.
"The harvest time on those was supposed to be seven years. So we are looking now at what we need to do to accomplish that. Also we need to make some adjustments to the pumps and to the irrigation ponds so we are going to start the process of finding money to address those issues."
The good news is that the town will still be able to sell the trees, Brown said.
"We won't make a lot of money selling them, but we will make some money," he said.
Brown said the town will have to determine if it will use trees again, and if so, what kind. It is possible another type of land application, possibly using other crop might be used.