Thanks to the seemingly never ending rainfall since last Friday, several sewer overflow incidents have been reported in the community of South Haven by the city’s Superintendent of the Wastewater Treatment Plant, Forrest Boothe.
Boothe reports that the first of two sanitary sewer overflows was recorded beginning on Friday, June 25th around 8am and didn’t end until early Sunday morning around 12:30am. That incident at the community’s golf course lift station resulted in the discharge of raw wastewater intermittently adding up to a total of around 10,000 gallons. Boothe says that sewer system overflow was “directly related to the inflow and infiltration of surface water into the collection system” from the torrential rains.
Concurrently with that situation, Boothe reports that starting around 9pm on Saturday, June 26th, and also running until about 12:30 am on Sunday morning, the South Haven Area Water Sewer Authority Wastewater Treatment Plant discharged partially treated wastewater into the Black River in the amount of roughly 100,000 gallons. That sewer system overflow was also directly related to surface water infiltrating the sewer collection system.
Both systems were severely taxed by the surface water from incessant rainfall across the region which also left thousands of people in the dark without power due to the storm systems moving through.
