Sewage entered Lafayette River during hurricane

NORFOLK

During Hurricane Irene, a 62-year-old sewer line ruptured near a marshy cove on the Lafayette River, across from the Virginia Zoo. Soon, raw sewage was flooding onto Luxemburg Avenue, threatening homes and possibly the health of residents.

The next morning, crews from the Hampton Roads Sanitation District made a decision: To clear the area and begin repairs, they started pumping sewage directly into the river through a series of hoses.

They pumped all day and night. In the end, the line was fixed, but not before an estimated 448,000 gallons of human sewage were discharged into the Lafayette, according to an HRSD incident report.

Neighbors were aghast as they watched the hectic scene in their backyards.

"If I had done that, I'd be in jail right now," said Joe McKenzie, who owns rental property on the cove. "We couldn't believe they were pumping that stuff right into the river. You can't do that."

McKenzie complained that his oyster garden, growing in the Lafayette off a nearby pier, was killed; that marsh grasses were contaminated and lay dead in patches; and that the river where crabs, clams and fish are caught by local watermen had been turned into a dump, if only temporarily.

After trying for weeks to contact sanitation officials to ask about the accident, without success, neighbors called The Virginian-Pilot. After the Pilot asked HRSD to explain what happened, "we had all kinds of people calling us and coming out here," said Lori Hardee, McKenzie's daughter.

An HRSD spokeswoman said this week that if the grasses do not recover, the public agency will replant them. It also will replace the dead oysters, and it will assess whether a pipeline that carries sewage under the Lafayette River should be replaced. That pipeline goes to a treatment plant near Old Dominion University.

Because so many sewer lines in the region are old and cracked and often leak during storms, HRSD and numerous localities are under orders from state and federal environmental regulators to replace those lines with modern ones. It is an expensive project that will take years to complete; utility rate hikes pay for it.

Despite its age, the Norfolk line that failed during Irene was not on the replacement list, mostly because it had not caused problems before, said Nancy Munnikhuysen, an HRSD spokeswoman.

HRSD called the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to report the incident right after it happened, as required by law, and state inspectors visited the scene and "had no recommendations and reported no concerns to our engineer on site," Munnikhuysen wrote in an email.

Mark Sauer, who oversees wastewater permits for the state environmental department, said HRSD is not allowed to pump wastewater into creeks or rivers, regardless of the circumstances.

However, he added, because the agency already is under orders to replace leaky lines, the state will not pursue an enforcement action over this incident.

Sauer said the environmental department likely received other notices of sewage spills after Irene, though he could not say how many. The Luxemburg Avenue incident, he added, was probably the largest.

The incident report compiled by HRSD says the crush of so much raw sewage caused bacteria levels to spike in the Lafayette and an algae bloom to form, making it difficult for aquatic life to breathe.

The report notes, however, that ecological conditions returned to normal less than a week afterward and that the damage, "if any, was short-lived and temporary."

Last week, HRSD reported that a power failure at its treatment plant near ODU caused officials to release about 630,000 gallons of sewage into the Elizabeth River to avoid possible problems in neighborhoods near the plant.

Luxemburg Avenue residents, while thankful for the belated attention to the cove, remain concerned the next storm will bring more problems. And they wonder why HRSD did not go public with the pumping incident the way the agency did after the power failure.

"They made an executive decision to pollute," said John Dennison, a retired plumber and government inspector, who lives on the cove, "and didn't say anything about it to the people who live here."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com