I had written that it was partially back online two days ago after being offline for 78 days while it was dumping Seattle/s raw sewage into Puget Sound. Yesterday, The Seattle Times published an in-depth analysis of what actually happened:
A disaster years in the making
As Emily Carlson frantically tried to outrun the rushing and rising brown water, the operator-in-training at the West Point wastewater-treatment plant fell waist deep into a tank. Injured, in pain and frightened, she struggled to stand. Then she went into shock. It was shortly after 2:30 a.m.
Not long before, lights had flickered in the plant. Several alarms alerted supervisor Charles Wenig that four critical pumps that push treated wastewater out of the plant had choked. Maximum flows were surging in from all over Seattle and beyond, after days of steady but not record-breaking rain.
Precious minutes ticked by as wastewater poured in, and two men on Wenig’s crew kept working to restart the pumps.
They were counting on equipment and systems elsewhere to protect the plant from a flood on a wet-weather night. But for more than a half-hour, at least 15 million gallons of untreated wastewater — including raw sewage — swamped the plant, pouring down stairs, smashing doors, flooding tunnels and hallways, and drowning millions of dollars of equipment as employees fled.
The Seattle Times, through interviews and reviewing more than 7,000 documents, found errors in judgment, poor communication, a lack of training, equipment failures and faulty maintenance led to the disastrous flood at West Point on Feb. 9.
Very well written - the culprit was a poor design of float switch used to measure water level. All eight of them failed in the same way. They had been identified as a very weak point in 2000 when they first failed. In 2004, it was recommended that they be tested regularly - this was not done. In 2008, they were found to be not functional - they were repaired but not replaced.
Leave a comment