SALYERSVILLE – A State of Emergency was declared in Salyersville and Magoffin County Wednesday, June 12, as crews became aware of a major line failure at the sewer treatment plant on U.S. 460 West near North Magoffin Elementary.
Mortimer Media Group has be assured that there is no danger of water quality of supply for the community, nor any interruptions in sewer services. However, crews had to work around the clock for days as they tried to keep sewage from backing up as they installed a temporary line, requiring hauling off hundreds of thousands of gallons of sewage by large tanker trucks.
The sewer plant receives sewage from two different lines, one from town and one from U.S. 460 West communities. Both come into the sewer treatment plant, connect to a 14” main line at the edge of the road and travels into the front of the plant, but that 14” line is what had completely disintegrated in parts and spewing sewage under the ground and into the creek for an unknown amount of time.
Magoffin County Judge/Executive Matthew Wireman said on Thursday, “Yesterday I was at a conference in Lexington for county judges and I got a call from the mayor saying we had an emergency situation with the sewer and that it was spilling raw sewage into the Licking River. I immediately contacted my EM, Robert Prater, and spoke with Representative Blanton, and then we talked to the state EM director and put a plan together to get a contractor to come in, but we didn’t know what the situation was at that time.”
Judge Wireman said he met with the mayor when he returned back to Salyersville and they went through the process of declaring a state of emergency so they can procure resources to stop the sewage from going into the river.
After that, they met with contractors and a plan of action was created to rotate 3,300-gallon pumper tanks to the lift station.
Initially, the leak was caught when a lawn mower went over some soft ground.
“We were mowing the lawn and it was a real swampy area,” Salyersville Mayor Stanley Howard told Mortimer Media Group. “We could smell it, so we thought we had a leak, so we brought in the backhoe and started digging down and the pipe was gone. We went 75 feet and there’s no pipe.”
The sewer treatment plant was established in 2001 and that would have been when the steel or iron line was run, which completely doesn’t exist now, with only couplers that joined pieces of pipe as evidence the line was ever there.
Other exposed parts of pipe were found, all leaking into the ground and creek, all of which runs to the Licking River. The mostly missing line connected all sewer customers in Salyersville and Magoffin to the treatment plant.
“As soon as we saw the problem we called this company and they came out,” Mayor Howard said. “They brought three trucks and a tank, and they’re hauling approximately 3,000 gallons a trip, seven minutes to fill up, one mile away and we’re not keeping up with it with three trucks.”
They brought in another truck and storage tanking, hauling the over 300,000 gallons of sewage (per day) from the old sewer treatment plant, where there is a storage tank at the bottom of the Ivy Point Hill, to the new sewer treatment plant.
Mayor Howard said they put down an 8” temporary line to reconnect the sewage lines to the plant, again, but they will have to bid out the bigger, more permanent solution.
“That 8” will just keep up with it,” Howard said. “We need a 14, but the 8” line, the engineers say that will work temporarily and we’re looking at having it on line tomorrow evening.”
The temporary line was in place by Friday evening, running above the ground, and will remain in place while the permanent line can be installed.
“There’s no danger in the water system,” Mayor Howard said. “The spill is behind where the intake is to pick up the water for our drinking water, so city and county wide, the water is perfect. We’ve got it not going in the river now. We’ve got it contained and we’re doing everything. State’s here and the EPA. Everything is good. We’ve got no environmental impact right now other than what happened before.”
Howard also told Mortimer Media Group they’re going over the records from the last five years to hopefully find when the plant started to treat less sewage.
