(Milford)– Steve Anderson, Superintendent of the Iowa Great Lakes Sanitary District, says the recent heavy rains have been putting a strain on their collection system. He adds the power outage early Monday quickly made matters worse…
“We lost power to all of the lift stations around Big Spirit Lake. We lost power on the west side of West Okoboji and part of the north side of West Okoboji. The rain came, the ground is saturated, so we’re getting water in. We’re also getting a lot of sump pumps. We’ve been finding them but we’re just not finding them fast enough. A combination of that has led to at least one of the bypasses. The other one, there was a mechanical issue. A valve got stuck open and the water came into the lift station and actually got into some of the electrical stuff. Those bypasses are both over with but again, it goes back to, we’re trying to get these sump pumps out of the sewer system and we are going to start knocking door-to-door in the areas that we have issues with. We need the sump pumps out. If they’re not, the sanitary district will start looking at penalties against people.”
Anderson says it’s also important to quit running water whenever the power goes out…
“When we do have power outages like that, one of the key things for us is to limit your water usage and most people are because you can’t wash clothes and you can’t to those types of things but any time even after the power comes back on, you know, give that sewer system three, four hours to be able to get itself caught up. Power started coming back on. People started taking showers, people started washing clothes, started dishwashers, and all of that kind of stuff. Everyone does that at once it just inundates the sewer system.”
Anderson says the Iowa Great Lakes Sanitary District has been making strides recently in installing generators at lift stations along its collection system but he says more remains to be done.
