Advertisement

Editorial: St. Petersburg's leaky sewers and explanations

 
Signs at North Shore Park in St. Petersburg, posted in September, warn people to stay out of the water due to contamination from partially treated sewage from the city's overwhelmed sewer system. [Times files]
Signs at North Shore Park in St. Petersburg, posted in September, warn people to stay out of the water due to contamination from partially treated sewage from the city's overwhelmed sewer system. [Times files]
Published Oct. 25, 2016

The explanations and equivocations about St. Petersburg's ongoing sewer crisis are as leaky as the city's sad, century-old system of collapsing pipes. The toll of the spills grows. The time line to fix the system gets longer. Even claims that once seemed certain become fluid. Tampa Bay residents are tired of fuzzy answers from St. Petersburg officials, angry about potential damage to the environment and wondering when this mess will end.

In the past 14 months, as St. Petersburg discharged millions of gallons of untreated and partially treated wastewater into local waterways, officials have blamed extraordinary weather and leaks in an ancient sewer system with pipes so porous that they are overwhelmed when it rains. They have been loath to admit mistakes. Advice from well-paid consultants piles up, but to what end? One consultant offered this advice on Monday to the City Council: The city staff relies on too many consultants. Meanwhile, no one is making sure the whole system works as it should.

Now it's known that a warning bell rang three years ago, when the sewer system, running at full strength, was inundated during a bout of rain, and officials were forced to pump 10 million gallons of wastewater deep into the Floridan aquifer. Any lesson that might have been learned from that incident went unheeded. The city literally missed the memo in 2014 warning about the possibility of overflows and decommissioned one of its four treatment plants, reducing the sewer system's capacity by nearly 20 percent.

Evolving explanations from City Hall about how things got to this point haven't helped. For months, Mayor Rick Kriseman's administration stuck to the position that the Albert Whitted plant could not be reopened — it was too old and out of date. The ensuing spills nudged them to reopen it for storage purposes only, until the reversal became complete last month with public works director Claude Tankersley recommending reopening Albert Whitted permanently. Then came Monday's meeting with the City Council, during which Tankersley said that his timetable and cost estimates for getting it done might have been "premature." (Meaning, it will take longer and be more expensive.) In September, the mayor's office said nothing about a 58 million-gallon spill in the northwest part of St. Petersburg, insisting after it became public that the water was clean so the public didn't need to be notified. Then a whistle-blower questioned that claim and Kriseman, after further review, was forced to admit that the water wasn't so clean after all.

The toll of the past year's discharges in St. Petersburg is pushing 200 million gallons — with a month still to go in this hurricane season and another one always around the corner. This is literally a Tampa Bay problem, because wastewater doesn't respect municipal boundaries. But it's up to St. Petersburg to solve it now, for once and for all.