| Jonathan Gerhardson
jgerhardson@thereminder.com
Category:
AGAWAM — Mayor William Sapelli and Water Department Deputy Superintendent John Decker say they do not know how long a pipe was broken and when it began spewing untreated sewage into the Westfield River last month.
“Just like any sewer line, not just the one by the river, but one in the street, we don’t know that breaks until it starts showing up, quite frankly,” said Sapelli. “And in this case, nobody saw it until fortunately the kayaker did see it. How long it was happening? It’s anyone’s guess,” he said.
A kayaker reportedly noticed discoloration of the water, along with an odor, on June 30, but did not report it to authorities until a week later. On July 7 at 4 p.m., the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) notified the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) of the report. DEP immediately contacted the kayaker, who described what he saw in June and confirmed that he had not reported his observations until July 7. Upon confirmation, DEP notified the Agawam Department of Public Works, according to Kathleen Fournier, coordinator of the DEP’s Western Regional Office.
Efforts were made by the Agawam DPW to locate the issue that evening, but “the extremely dense vegetation and poison ivy limited those efforts,” according to Decker.
Machinery was brought out first thing in the next morning to clear a path through the vegetation. The broken pipe was found near a town-owned pump station behind the H.P. Hood dairy plant on Main Street.
“Upon locating and verification, the leak was isolated and ceased within one hour,” said Decker. He estimated that sewage had been pouring into the Westfield River at a rate of 50 gallons per minute, based on field observations from that morning. An average bathtub faucet has a flow rate of around 7 gallons per minute.
The pump station off Main Street handles 30 percent of the town’s untreated sewage, which flows downhill through pipes to that point before being pumped to the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission wastewater plant on Bondi’s Island. The pump is supposed to be inspected daily, a task Agawam contracts to Veolia Water Inc. However, the broken pipe was located “several hundred feet down the easement from the pump station, and is not part of the daily inspections,” according to Decker.
A representative from Veolia Water could not be reached for contact before The Reminder’s deadline.
“Detecting leaks can be tricky,” said Marcia Berger, president of Clean Properties Engineering. “Having one incident, the river can clean itself out. Yes, it’s bad for the organisms, but by the time you complain about it, it’s gone. So it’s more about how do you prevent this from continuing to happen,” she said.
Pollution of the Westfield River has decreased in recent years. In 2016, the federal Environmental Protection Agency reclassified the river from category 5 — a designation reserved under the Clean Water Act for waterways that are “impaired or threatened by pollutant(s) for one or more designated uses” — to the less severe category 2.
According to the EPA, the primary risks to waterways contaminated with raw sewage are increased bacterial loads, which can make the water unsafe for swimming and boating, and nitrification of the water, which can lead to hypoxia — reduced oxygen levels, which can cause die-offs of aquatic life.
Sapelli said the town treated the land where the discharged sewage had flowed, but did not take any samples from the river for testing.