A supervisor in Thomasville's public-utilities division has resigned after allegations arose that someone at the city's sewage-treatment plant knew about a major sewage leak earlier than was originally reported.
That leak, which took place between mid-July and early August, sent as much as 16 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the river system feeding into High Rock Lake, which is used as a public water source.
Tests performed last weekend showed no dangerous amounts of bacteria in the river system a month and a half after the leak was fixed.
George Burton, a member of the Thomasville City Council, confirmed the resignation yesterday, but he could not provide the name of the supervisor.
The utilities director, Morgan Huffman, could not be reached for comment.
City Manager Kelly Craver said that the employee resigned because he didn't send crews to check out a report of a sewage smell on July 31. The employee is eligible for retirement after working 32 years with the city, he said.
The spill is by far the largest on record in North Carolina. State records, which only date to 1998, show the previous largest spill was 9 million gallons in December 2002 in Raleigh.
The spill, which may have begun as early as mid-July, continued until Aug. 4, when it was stopped.
The city initially reported the spill on Aug. 3, saying that 385,000 gallons of untreated wastewater had been dumped. City officials say they based that estimate on the belief that the spill had occurred for two days.
The estimate jumped to 15.93 million gallons when the city submitted a revised estimate to state environmental officials in September. Craver said that the sewage went into a tributary of North Hamby Creek, which feeds into Abbotts Creek and into the more-than-15,000-acre High Rock Lake. The cause of the spill was traced to a collapsed pipe, he said.
Yadkin Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks sent a report to the Environmental Protection Agency's criminal-investigation division in Charlotte on Aug. 27, saying that an employee had told him that he believed that the spill began in mid-July. Naujoks' report says that an operator responsible in charge at the plant reported a drop in flow about July 13, from an average of 2 million gallons a day to 1.2 million gallons a day.
The EPA ordered the city to recalculate the amount of the spill based on creating a baseline over the past four months, Craver said. Beginning July 16, anything higher than that baseline was considered spilled, he said.
City officials have reviewed plant logs and interviewed employees "and we can't find the red flag," he said. "There's nothing that says it happened here. There's some erratic data, but there isn't consistent data that shows low flow to the plant."
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement