Surry resident Phyllis Gibson worries about a wastewater treatment plant in a city where she doesn’t even live.
Her home, situated on Union River Bay, sits downstream of an aging Ellsworth wastewater facility that can’t always handle the city’s inflow. A heavy rain can engage an illegal bypass in the system that will dump untreated wastewater directly into the Union River, where it will then flow into the wider bay.
“The pollution is coming out of Ellsworth and going east as well as west,” Gibson said.
Gibson feels Ellsworth city officials are moving too slow at fixing the problem. Ultimately, the city plans to construct a new wastewater treatment plant, but groundbreaking for the facility will be at least four to six years away.
Meanwhile, the city is welcoming an influx of new development that will hook onto the existing wastewater treatment plant, including a Lowe’s superstore and a rumored Super Wal-Mart. Gibson said this shows the city’s priorities are out of line.
“Ellsworth is perfectly willing to let in a lot of big-box stores, but not to build a new wastewater treatment plant,” she said.
Surry selectwoman Ellie Carlisle said Gibson isn’t the only one concerned in her town. She said many Surry residents can’t clam on their own land because of contamination from the treatment plant’s overflow.
“We would clam on our property,” she said.
While waters around the treatment facility have always been closed to shellfish harvest, an additional 6700 acres of the bay from Surry to Trenton is put off limits periodically because of the bypass or mechanical failure at the plant. Sometimes, this additional closure can last for months at a time.
Carlisle has been in contact with both the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and Ellsworth city officials to try and find a solution.
“It’s not that we’re trying to do something behind their backs,” Carlisle said. “It’s just that we’re concerned.”
A Fortuitous Fire
No one knew about the illegal bypass until 2001, when a fire in the wastewater treatment plant caused it to shut down. When wastewater treatment officials called Maine DEP to report the problem, inspector Clarissa Trasko fielded the call.
“My question to them was, `Well, where did your wastewater go?” she said.
By all rights, the plant or the city should have been having an acute wastewater problem at that moment. Instead, as was soon discovered, an illegal bypass was dumping the wastewater directly into the Union River. No one knew when the bypass was installed or why.
Since then, city officials monitor the bypass’s outgoing pipe with a flow meter and report any activity to Trasko.
Untreated fecal matter in waterways can carry harmful viruses, diseases, and bacteria like Hepatitis A and salmonella, said Bob Goodwin, public health scientist at the Lamoine branch of the Maine Department of Marine Resources. Humans also can suffer paralysis or death from eating shellfish that feed on untreated waste.
Goodwin said untreated wastewater also poses a threat to aquatic ecosystems. Organisms that feed on untreated waste rapidly use up a waterway’s available oxygen supply. The results can be disastrous for other aquatic life.
“If you’re a fish, it’d feel like someone choking you or putting a bag over your head,” Goodwin said.
The results could start a population crash throughout a waterway’s food web and affect larger animals like seals and ospreys.
Gibson believes she’s seeing that phenomenon from her Surry home. When she first moved there eight years ago, the area surrounding her home was teeming with wildlife. Over time, she claims, she’s watched that wildlife become scarcer.
“[Even] the ducks are getting fewer and fewer,” Gibson said.
Ken Cline, College of the Atlantic professor and a leader of the local Union River Watershed Coalition, has heard similar comments from others.
“I’ve heard the same reports,” Cline said. “They’re not seeing the same birds as they used to.”
But Cline knows of no scientific study of the Union River watershed that can back up such anecdotal accounts or pinpoint a probable cause. While it could be the treatment plant, Cline said, there are many other reasons why wildlife populations could fluctuate.
There isn’t even a baseline study available of current conditions of the bay, he said. Cline is hoping to undertake such a study in two to three years.
Cleaning Up
Maine DEP originally drafted a consent agreement laying out the steps Ellsworth must take to bring their treatment system into compliance with state and federal clean water laws. If Ellsworth does not comply, the city could face a fine of $100 to $10,000 a day for non-compliance.
When city officials sign the agreement, they will immediately face an undisclosed fine for the illegal bypass.
But so far, the city hasn’t signed the agreement, and now Maine DEP is working on a different draft of it, according to Dennis Merrill, water enforcement officer for the Maine DEP.
“We’re going to look at the water conditions in the Union River more,” he said.
Merrill declined to give a timeline for delivering the new consent agreement to the city, but believed water samples would have to wait for warmer weather.
Ellsworth’s current strategy is to minimize overflow events by creative management and a tightening of the city’s sewer systems. Even critics agree that these measures have already paid off, especially since Mike Harris became the plant’s superintendent two years ago.
Trasko of Maine DEP said Harris and plant employees have done a remarkable job redesigning the plant to accommodate more inflow.
“They’re manipulating it well,” she said.
Ellsworth city manager Stephen Gunty said Harris has saved the city tens of thousands of dollars by repairing machinery that would otherwise need replacing. Harris has also been creative with his solutions, he said. When a lightning strike destroyed an anaerobic digestion tank at the plant, for example, Harris simply converted the tank to aerobic digestion.
“He made lemonade out of the lemon,” Gunty said.
In public letters, Harris has said such measures helped reduce the number of bypass events from thirteen in 2005 to 2 in 2006 (through mid-December).
But there are limits to what Harris can do. With aging equipment, there is always the chance that machinery can break. And in the event of a heavy rain, Harris admitted, nothing can prevent the wastewater treatment plant from becoming overloaded. The plant is licensed to handle 850,000 gallons of water; when bypasses occur, Harris said, the plant is inundated with some four million gallons. If there were a wet season, the number of bypass events would increase.
“It’s all weather-related,” Harris said.
A Long Time Off
Everyone agrees Ellsworth must build a new plant; there simply isn’t room at the plant’s current location to accommodate necessary expansion.
But no one knows for sure when a new plant will be constructed. Published reports say Gunty originally thought final engineering for the new plant would be done by 2005, but in a December interview with Working Waterfront, Gunty admitted engineering hasn’t even begun yet.
Maine DEP currently envisions the plant start-up date no sooner than June 30, 2010. Gunty isn’t convinced of that timeline.
“That could be a little ambitious,” he said.
While the city recently announced purchase of an option on land for the new plant, Gunty said engineering plans can’t begin until Maine DEP finalizes the consent agreement and dictates what the new plant must look like.
Even when the city has this information in hand, there is still the problem of funding. Officials say a new plant will cost an estimated $14-$15 million, but the city only has been able to raise $5 million at this point.
“We’ve run into perhaps a hurdle there,” Gunty said.
But some say the city is planning a bigger treatment plant than its citizens need. Todd Little-Siebold, de facto spokesperson for the grassroots citizen’s group Wise Planning for Ellsworth, believes a good wastewater treatment plant can be built for closer to $9 million. The extra money budgeted for the facility, he contends, is to build a plant that can accommodate wastewater of future big box development that many Ellsworth residents would rather not have. The plant is being designed according to an out-of-date growth plan for the city, he said.
Little-Siebold said city officials are caught in a Catch-22, because they must build a bigger plant to attract big-box development, but don’t have the money to continuously expand infrastructure to meet the demands such stores would bring.
“The town is now going to be on the infrastructure-building treadmill,” Little-Siebold said.
Moratorium the Answer?
So if the town can’t handle all the wastewater coming its way, should it be allowed to bring in more?
Some, like Gibson, feel the answer is no. In a letter to the Ellsworth American, she called for a moratorium on all new development until there was no longer the threat of a wastewater bypass.
But while Maine DEP has the power to impose such a restriction, Trasko said a state-imposed moratorium isn’t necessary. She said her department’s been impressed with the city’s moves to remove illegal hookups, roof drains, and storm drainage from the system.
She said Maine DEP would continue to let Ellsworth grow as long as the city can take a gallon of rainwater out of the system for every new gallon of wastewater it wants to bring in. This will at least keep things at the status quo, while allowing Ellsworth to function.
“The ultimate good is being served by this,” she said.
But some area residents, like Gibson and Carlisle, aren’t convinced. Gibson doesn’t understand why Maine DEP is taking what she feels is a lenient stance on an obvious environmental violator. She believes quicker action is needed or the bay’s ecosystem will be the victim.
“If we wait until Ellsworth finally gets it together…the bay will be as dead as a doornail,” Gibson said.
Gibson hopes to enlist local state representatives to raise awareness of the problem and possible state funding. She’s also considering legal action in conjunction with a national environmental group.
“The only way to compel them to fix this wastewater treatment plant is political pressure,” she said.
Carlisle believes more people need to speak out about Ellsworth’s wastewater woes if anything is to be done.
“I encourage people with concerns to write because that’s what people listen to,” Carlisle said.