Turns out South Haven wasn’t the only Lake Michigan shoreline community facing sanitary sewer overflow issues in the recent heavy rainfalls of October. A report filed with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality shows that on Saturday, October 14th when South Haven’s system put some 10-to-13,000 gallons of diluted sewage into the Black River, St. Joe had more than 3-million gallons pour into the Morrison Channel near the city’s Public Works operations on Broad Street in the city.
According to a detailed Combined Sewer Overflow incident report at the DEQ, that day’s nearly 5-inches of rainfall sent and estimated 3.3-million gallons of diluted raw sewage into the St. Joseph River’s Morrison Channel beginning at 10:05am and not ending until just minutes before 9pm.
Allen Arny is Acting Supervisor for the city’s Department of Water & Sewer Distribution. He said there was very little that he could tell me about the report because it was not one that he had filed. He said he was unaware of the report, event though the overflow site was just yards away from the Public Works offices. In fact, he thought that I was talking about another issue, which might have been an instance of a contained issue at the St. Joseph-Benton Harbor Joint Sewage Treatment Plant on Marina Island in the city, but that overflow of raw sewage did not reach open water, and was quickly resolved.
As a result, there is no immediate indication of the impact that 11-hour overflow had on the system, the channel or the river proper.
The torrential rains so far in October have played havoc with a number of communities, however the nearly 11 hour overflow in St. Joe was considerably longer than the two-and-a-half hour long flow into the Black River basin at South Haven.
The DEQ database also reflected new incidents of sanitary sewer overflows this morning by three other Berrien County units including Benton Charter Township at 1:12 this afternoon, Lake Charter Township at 11:55 this morning and the Galien River Sewer District Sewer Authority at 8:30 this morning. None of those incidents was defined in any way, and DEQ requirements call for reports of any discharge event have to be filed within 24 hours of the initial discharge. There is no indication that any of those is expected to reflect a major incident of any sort.
