|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
June 19, 2005Burst tank rocks septage plant$7.8 million facility open only a monthByRecord-Eagle staff writer TRAVERSE CITY - A tank at Grand Traverse County's month-old septage treatment plant burst, shredding a wall to rubble and spilling thousands of gallons of treated waste into lagoons surrounding the facility. The building collapse happened between 1:30 and 7 a.m. Saturday at the $7.8 million state-of-the-art plant on Ahlberg Road. No one was injured and officials said any contamination should be contained at the site. The plant has been open less than a month. Michael Houlihan, an attorney who represented the county's Board of Public Works in its deal with contractor Gourdie-Fraser/Christman to build the plant, said engineers did not immediately know why the concrete tank burst. The plant will no longer be able to accept waste from septage haulers. The county built the plant to treat waste from the county's 28,000 septic tanks as an alternative to spreading that waste in fields. Saturday, around 20,000 gallons of treated waste that spilled into a lagoon at the side of the plant were pumped out and taken to the Traverse City regional wastewater plant, Houlihan said. Houlihan said he didn't know how long it would take to repair the septage plant or how much it would cost, but he said the county should not have to bear the burden. "This is the contractor's responsibility at this point," Houlihan said. "The word from the county is we have complete confidence in these guys, they're going to make this right as soon as they can - in fact, they're already working on it." A message left at Gourdie-Fraser was not immediately returned. The first order of business Saturday was to pump up whatever waste could be hauled away and to spread lime over ground where the treated waste had seeped in. One worker hung a sign on the barbed wire fence surrounding the facility that read "Sewage Spill Area - Do No Enter." Houlihan said the tank burst but did not explode. But Saturday afternoon, the plant looked like the site of an explosion. At least one wall had blown out, exposing the interior of the building, and debris littered the area. Two garage doors on the building that held the tank bulged outward. An employee from the company that operates the plant discovered the waste spill at around 7 a.m. Al Scriver lives on Keystone Hills Drive below the plant and he said he heard what sounded like "a big explosion" coming from the direction of the plant at 5:15 or 5:30 a.m. It sounded "like a couple cars coming together in an accident," Scriver said. "I looked because I thought maybe there was a fire or something." But Scriver didn't see a fire and at around 7 a.m. he said he heard workers called to the scene on his scanner. Lonnie Williams arrived at his job at the nearby Cherryland Humane Society after emergency crews arrived. "It was a mess when I got here, they had fire trucks and everything, it was blocked all the way down," Williams said. Because the spill consisted of treated waste, there was no foul smell at the facility Saturday afternoon. Williams said he didn't notice a sewage smell Saturday morning, but the air didn't smell like it usually did. "You could smell just a weird smell that was out there," Williams said.
|
|
