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City Says Lake OK After Spills By Swedish

Posted on: Monday, 13 February 2006, 21:00 CST

By Warren Cornwall, The Seattle Times

Feb. 13--When the news broke last year that Swedish Medical Center had been accidentally flushing sewage into Lake Union for years, there was concern that it might have taken a toll on the health of the lake.

But the impact appears to be confined to a small area around a pipe that drained into the south end of the lake, according to city officials.

An environmental consultant for the city says the discharges -- now stopped -- shouldn't affect the lake's overall water quality.

The lake is too big, and cleaned out too quickly by water circulating from Lake Washington, for that amount of sewage "to cause a measurable change in the water quality of the lake," Harry Gibbons, a scientist with the environmental consulting firm Tetra Tech, wrote in a memo to Seattle Public Utilities.

A team of divers did find a white fungus growing on the bottom of the lake near the pipe, likely there because the sewage helped fertilize the fungus. There also was little sign of plant life or small underwater larvae living in that area, according to consultants hired to check the lake after the problem was discovered.

But that patch of the lake is being untouched for now, in the hope the fungus will fade now that the sewage connection at the First Hill campus has been fixed, said utilities spokesman Andy Ryan.

City inspectors say they are watching more closely repeated pollution problems at stormwater pipes, with the idea of catching chronic problems more quickly. And Swedish has paid the city $2,700 -- what it cost to track down the problem.

"We've definitely talked since this has happened and really tightened up on our program," said Louise Kulzer, who manages the city workers who investigate spills from stormwater pipes.

The hospital had been accidentally flushing sewage into a storm drain leading to Lake Union for at least seven years. The problem first was discovered in 1998 by city sewer inspectors. That's when they filmed sewage flowing from a hospital pipe into the storm drain. Storm drains are designed to carry only rainwater runoff.

On the videotape, a voice is heard saying, "I think we have enough here to show that some bad things are getting into the storm line."

But nothing was done at the time. It wasn't until a city inspector last October started tracking the trail of toilet paper and sewage through a maze of pipes that the problem was brought to light and fixed.

The city has interviewed the two city workers involved in filming the pipe, and they can't recall what happened, according to internal utility-department e-mails that the department released to The Seattle Times. There's no paperwork that shows whether the problem was reported to higher-ups at the utility, Ryan said.

The department has since changed its procedures to require written reports of such problems to help prevent such mistakes in the future, according to city officials.

The city also received six complaints about pollution coming out of the same pipe or near the pipe into Lake Union between 2000 and 2005, but it was never tracked to Swedish.

City inspectors were stymied in those cases because they didn't see the pollution coming from the pipe when they arrived and couldn't trace the spill through underground pipes, or because it looked like it came from nearby construction sites, said Kulzer.

"It's just very hard to find these things," she said.

But Rick Poulin, a Seattle attorney who has sued public agencies for clean-water violations, and is looking into the Swedish incident, wasn't satisfied.

"To me it's just frustrating, if not outrageous, that it took them [Seattle Public Utilities] eight years to figure out what was going on," he said.

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Source: The Seattle Times

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