Slight sewer problem

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http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/state_agency_offices_pollute_c.html
Quote:
VANCOUVER -- Thirteen years after Washington state's environmental agency found a creek severely polluted, the contamination has been traced back to the agency's regional office.

City workers discovered this week that a sewer line from the building housing the regional offices of the state Department of Ecology and Department of Fish and Game, and a small U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contingent, was mistakenly connected to a storm water runoff system, rather than a municipal sewer main.

As a result, sewage from the building has been entering Burnt Bridge Creek and eventually Vancouver Lake for an unknown number of years.

Workers in the leased offices were stunned when they got the word Wednesday, The Columbian newspaper reported.


Ooops...
 
Originally Posted By: Tempest
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/state_agency_offices_pollute_c.html
Quote:
VANCOUVER -- Thirteen years after Washington state's environmental agency found a creek severely polluted, the contamination has been traced back to the agency's regional office.

City workers discovered this week that a sewer line from the building housing the regional offices of the state Department of Ecology and Department of Fish and Game, and a small U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contingent, was mistakenly connected to a storm water runoff system, rather than a municipal sewer main.

As a result, sewage from the building has been entering Burnt Bridge Creek and eventually Vancouver Lake for an unknown number of years.

Workers in the leased offices were stunned when they got the word Wednesday, The Columbian newspaper reported.


Ooops...





If this was an individual or a private business, there would be a huge fine. Because it's a government business, all they can say is "Holy [censored]".
 
If I read the word "leased" correctly, they neither designed nor built the offices.

Quote:
State officials believe the problem dates from the opening of the building in the early 1970s as a garden center for a Fred Meyer outlet across the street. The garden center was closed in the mid-1990s and in 1997 the building was reopened with offices for 80 Fish and Wildlife employees, 14 from Ecology and three from the Army engineers.


So any implication that it was the agency "snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory" is just being ..well ..you know
grin2.gif
 
Quote:
For 2½ years, city workers have been using a probe mounted with a small television camera to survey 300 miles of underground storm water pipes. Municipal public works director Brian Carlson said this is the first time an old sanitary sewer has been found mistakenly hooked into a storm water pipe.

What's really funny is that it took them 2 1/2 years to find the problem...under their own building.
 
Well, again, if I read it correctly, the pollution was detected by the STATE environmental agency that then charged the city with finding the cause. It wasn't "their building" and "they" weren't finding the problem.

There's irony there, but it's not due to any incompetence or negligence ..or wasteful spending on their part.

Can you spin it up to indicate otherwise??

I will agree that there's a comical "we've found the enemy ..and it is us" dark poetic ring to it.

Before they entered into the lease, some sweat and toil millionaire enterprise was polluting the creek. Kudos!!!! They gave all that revenue to the camera people and gave the state agency's reason for being in existence merit.

How's that for "tinkle down"??
grin2.gif
 
Here I am, living within a stone's throw of Burnt Bridge Creek and I find out about it on BITOG...The world is getting stranger every minute.

Clark
 
On a similar note, I know a local business owner who was having an non-permitted bathroom installed in his building. The low-bucks plumber plumbed the toilet to the rain downspout piping instead of the sewer. When they'd flush the toilet it would run out into the gutter on Main st. in front of the building. The city caught it within a day when investigating a complaint about poop and TP in the gutter and the problem was remedied quicly. If any of the sewage would have made it into the local creek he'd have been fined big time because it is an endangered fish habitat.

I love the irony/comedy of the WA story.
 
We are lucky we have separate sewer pipe systems for different kinds of waste. In most places, it's all mixed together, and no it does not go to the waste treatment plant.
 
Originally Posted By: Gary Allan

There's irony there, but it's not due to any incompetence or negligence ..or wasteful spending on their part.


Shouldn't something like this have been caught when the building was inspected during construction?
 
Originally Posted By: tom slick
If any of the sewage would have made it into the local creek ...


..they would have given the creek the obvious new name...
 
Originally Posted By: brianl703
Originally Posted By: Gary Allan

There's irony there, but it's not due to any incompetence or negligence ..or wasteful spending on their part.


Shouldn't something like this have been caught when the building was inspected during construction?


One would think so. Obviously someone blew it during the construction process. I would imagine that it was no more expensive to hook up to the sanitary line than it was the storm water line. Someone read the prints wrong ..and someone didn't inspect it right.
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I was tasked with doing a flow audit on our plant waste streams. I came across a pipe with a valve that did nothing marked "CONC WASTE" (concentrated). I couldn't figure out why it was there and why anyone would attach it to that process which had no business going to conc waste holding. By the time it filtered through the various levels of management, they figured that it probably cost us a few hundred grand for the improper installation based on how long it had been that way. That part of the project itself (that installation) was about $1000.
 
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