Stick caused 7,000-gallon sewage leak into Sweeten Creek

ASHEVILLE – A stick lodged in a pipe caused a 7,416-gallon sewage spill into Sweeten Creek on June 23.

An official with the Buncombe County Metropolitan Sewerage District talked Monday about what workers discovered after the incident he described as one of the bigger spills this year. MSD has reacted to 38 sewage spills during this fiscal year which ends June 30.

"It's bigger than our average spill," Ken Stines, MSD director of system service, said.

Stines said a combination of the stick and unflushable wipes and other materials that don't disintegrate caused the pipe breach.

"We found a stick lodged sideways in the side of the pipe. Any time you have an obstacle like that, like a tree root, it collects the rags and things like that. It's like a snowball effect, you get a bigger piece and bigger piece."

Sweeten Creek flows into the Swannanoa River, which is a tributary of the French Broad River, a popular body of water for fishing, boating and floating. Stines said that while 7,416 gallons is a large quantity of sewage, it gets very diluted by the French Broad.

"Seven thousand gallons sounds like a lot, but when it hits 100,000 gallons a second, that's very minute."

In such spills, workers dam up streams and sweep them for solids, which can include paper towels, prophylactics and sanitary napkins.

It's not possible to say who put the stick in the pipe, Stines said, though it obviously happened upstream. In some past instances, sewerage workers have seen a homeowner lift a manhole to drain a flooded property. In another case children built a fort inside a sewer in Woodfin, he said. In both cases, materials could have gotten into the system that later caused pipes to burst.

The Sweeten Creek spill cost about $6,000-$7,000 in labor and involved 20 employees, he said.

Another contributing factor to sewage spills is the age of pipes, some which date back to the late 19th Century.

Since 1998, MSD has been rehabilitating 50,000 linear feet of sewage line — or 1 percent of MSD's total lines — every year. Stines said about $16 million is allocated to the project.