Thomas Breen photo
Dead fish floating down the Mill River in East Rock.
The water at Lighthouse Point is safe to swim in again, and the acute crisis of Monday’s two million-gallon sewage spill appears to be mostly over — even if dead fish can still be found floating along the Mill River.
But, local environmentalists cautioned, the threat of more sewage flowing into fresh water remains, thanks to the region’s old and decaying infrastructure and its combined sewers that mix storm runoff and sewage.
Save the Sound President Curt Johnson, Save the Sound Soundkeeper Bill Lucey, and Eli Whitney Museum Director Bill Brown all offered some version of that assessment Thursday afternoon during separate interviews with the Independent.
Their reflections came three days after a corroded sewer pipe near the Eli Whitney Museum collapsed, sending an estimated 2.1 million gallons of sewage from the broken main line into the nearby Mill River.
Click here for more on what happened, how the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) stopped the spill, its communication breakdown with city government, and the city’s recommendation against fishing in the Mill River and swimming at Lighthouse Point on Wednesday.
Save the Sound photo
Save the Sound intern Teagan Smith collecting water samples in New Haven Harbor Wednesday.
By Thursday afternoon, the most immediate health hazards presented by the sewage spill appeared to be passed.
Lucey said that the half-dozen water samples he took Wednesday morning from the mouth of the Mill River, the mouth of the Quinnipiac River, and further out in New Haven Harbor had come back as having relatively safe levels of the fecal indicator bacteria, enterococci. (He said the sample results showed enterococci levels of around 20 colony-forming units [CFUs], and that unsafe levels are those in excess of 104 CFUs.)
City spokesperson Gage Frank also told the Independent Thursday that the Health Department’s water samples from the river and the harbor showed safe levels of bacteria. He said the beach at Lighthouse Point Park is back open, though the city is still discouraging fishing in the Mill River.
Thomas Breen photo
A WPCA-posted sign in East Rock by the Mill River.
“Cleanup is basically done at the site and construction continues,” WPCA Chief Operating Officer Gary Zrelak told the Independent by email about the ongoing contractor work to build out a permanent replacement pipe on that stretch of Whitney Avenue. He said that the WPCA will have three boats out on the river Friday doing clean up. And he said a WPCA crew will be walking along the shore doing cleanup and posting bilingual “No Fishing” signs.
Thomas Breen photo
“This is an insult to the river that it will be able to heal from, but it’s definitely an insult,” Brown (pictured) said about Monday’s sewage spill.
He praised what he described as the “professionalism” of the WPCA workers who rushed to get pump trucks and replacement pipes to the scene Monday. He also pointed out that the WPCA was trying to be proactive in replacing a pipe they believed to be corroded.
“This is an organic problem which will be solved mostly by organic agents,” he said about the spill.
Taking a step back from the immediate concern of the spill, he said, there’s plenty to be worried about big picture.
“It’s just more evidence of how we’ve let our infrastructure lapse,” he said.
Save the Sound’s Curt Johnson (pictured) agreed, though he was much less sanguine about Monday’s spill. He called it “a major spill” and a “huge insult not only to the river, but to the harbor and the surrounding areas.”
He said his environmental advocacy nonprofit plans to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the WPCA to find out exactly how much the regional authority knew about the corroded pipe, and about what contracts they had in place to do what kind of fix-up work on the main line on that stretch of Whitney Avenue.
“It’s alarming that the WPCA appears to have known for years that this area of pipe was in terrible condition,” Johnson said in an email press release sent out Thursday morning. “Raw sewage shutting down our shoreline is unacceptable, but all too common, which is why a strong response and analysis are necessary.”
And yet, Johnson stressed during Thursday afternoon’s interview, this spill should provide a stark reminder to the general public that the region’s sewage collection systems are in desperate need of attention, and repair.
“We have pipes that go back 140 years” in this part of the state, he said. Federal, state, and municipal governments should be investing in pipe inspection and maintenance.
He said that a recent focus on shoring up sewage processing plants in the area has resulted in significantly less nitrogen leaking into bodies of water. Now is the time to turn that same focus to sewage collection systems.
Because once sewage gets into rivers and other bodies of water, he said, bacteria starve the water systems of oxygen, fish die, and people can get very, very sick.
The Mill River, by the Eli Whitney Museum.
Sewage leaks are not just the result of old and broken down pipes, he said. They’re also a byproduct of combined sewer overflows (CSOs). And, he said, Connecticut cities like New Haven and Bridgeport still have plenty of combined sewers: That is, collection systems that mix sewage water and stormwater runoff. During heavy rainstorms, which are becoming all the more common thanks to climate change, these combined systems back up — spilling a sewage‑y mix into the streets and, eventually, into nearby bodies of water.
He said that the state’s Sewage Right to Know Act should be strengthened so that all potentially affected municipalities are notified as soon, and as clearly, as possible when a sewage spill takes place, and that there are penalties for noncompliance. He also said that the state’s Clean Water Fund should receive adequate funding to help cover the costs of pipe repairs and combined sewer separations.
“The key is prevention,” he said. That means frequent inspections and repairs to the region’s sewage collection system, ideally funded in part through a federal infrastructure spending bill.
Lucey agreed. He said that far too much partially treated sewage seeps into the Long Island Sound every year as a matter of course because of badly designed and old infrastructure.
“Our goal is to get to a sewage-free Sound,” he said. The way to get there is focusing on both the immediate spills like Monday’s, he said, as well as on the bigger-picture structural problems that beset the region’s sewage collection system.
I am sorry but relatively safe levels is not what we need to hear. Nor is it practical to interpret it as SAFE for a community that has many people with limited resources and rely on these bodies of water for entertainment food and much more.