P-Town Sewer System Meltdown Causes Chaos over July 4 Weekend
Provincetown's sewer system is fully operational after a massive failure over the July 4 weekend.
An alarm went off at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday that signaled a loss of pressure on the vacuum sewer line. As a result of the problem, raw sewage began backing up into bathrooms, basements and then onto streets and sidewalks along Commercial Street.
A decrease in pressure is crucial because the vacuum suction is what pulls the waste from people's homes through the pipes and to the waste water treatment plant. It was not unusual for this alarm to go off — DPW workers said the alarm is sounded about every five or six weeks — due to a relatively common failure in the sewer controller valves that monitor pressure levels at each property hooked up to the sewer. It is usually easy to find the failed monitor and replace it without any effect on the system line as a whole.
The town's $30 million sewer system was designed, built, and is operated by AECOM (formerly Metcalf and Eddy.)
The timing for the emergency could not have been worse for public works officials.
The two AECOM subcontractors who responded to the alarm were stymied in their search for the loss of pressure by the July 4 parade, which proceeded down Commercial Street. This kept the engineers from checking manholes along the town's main thoroughfare.
The swelling crowds in town for the fireworks display, along with the increased traffic, further complicated the engineers' search for the cause of the pressure loss. All of the visitors and tourists spending the weekend at local hotels, bed and breakfasts, and guesthouses used the bathrooms with more frequency than on a regular weekend. This increased usage flooded the system with waste water that poured into a sewer line now unable to carry the flow to the treatment plant.
The four-inch hole that caused the failure - likely the result of debris in the system slamming into a vulnerable sewer connection - was found Monday evening in a sewer main running under Dyer Street in the town's East End. That section of pipe was cut out and replaced and the East End vacuum main, which runs along Commercial Street from Anthony Street to Snows Lane, was repaired.
The costs of this calamity are likely to add up quickly. In addition to hiring sewer pumping companies to remove and clean sewage from basements and bathrooms, some guesthouses reported guests checking out when informed they couldn't take showers or flush the toilet. Other landlords renting their properties to summer visitors had to pay for new accommodations for tenants displaced by the system failure. Then there will be the cost to clean and disinfect town streets and sidewalks.
Meanwhile, town officials are trying to figure out a way to prevent the situation from happening again.
An emergency meeting of the boards of selectmen and health was held Monday night. The board of selectmen said there had been a communications breakdown between AECOM and the town that resulted in local officials not being informed of the failure of the system until almost 10 hours after the first alarm. Town manager Sharon Lynn said she was unaware of the problem until the sewer backed up into her own home around 7 p.m. on Saturday.
"I think that we've taken major steps to make sure that kind of breakdown in communication doesn't ever happen again," Selectman Elaine Anderson said.
In the meantime, DPW director David Guertin has been assigned to investigate what went wrong and to recommend any changes in response protocol he believes are needed. Guertin expects that report to be done within a month.
Anderson told EDGE that AECOM will install additional alarms so that any future problems can be detected more quickly.
"It was very unfortunate that it occurred because the capacity of the sewer is not the issue, it was timing and the way in which information was distributed that created more of a problem than this should've been," Anderson noted.
If there was a silver lining to the crisis, it was the demonstration of the fortitude of the town's employees and residents, according to Anderson.
"I think we show our best side when we have these emergencies," she said.