By BRENT ISRAELSEN
Oct. 15, 2000 (The Salt Lake Tribune)—A spill this week of 25 million gallons of raw sewage into the lower Weber River has enraged environmentalists and prompted a federal inquiry.
"They've poisoned the river. They found condoms and [excrement] floating in there," Bill Stubbs, spokesman for the Great Salt Lake chapter of the Audubon Society, said Friday.
Sewage spilled into the river for about 18 hours on Wednesday as the Central Weber Sewer Improvement District upgraded its sewage treatment plant, south of Plain City in Weber County.
Construction required that the plant be shut down so sewage bypassed the normal treatment process. The district had a permit to do this from the Utah Division of Water Quality, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is questioning whether it was appropriate.
"We are not really too happy with the way the spill occurred," said FWS Utah field coordinator Reed Harris, whose agents on Friday were trying to learn more about the incident.
The district was required to notify various health departments and natural-resources agencies of the operation, but the FWS was not notified until Tuesday and had no time to review it, said Harris, who plans to bring the matter to the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
"We don't know how many alternatives [the state and the sewer district] looked at or how rigorous they were in looking at all their options. It seems strange in this day and age that we couldn't have come up with a better alternative than dumping raw sewage directly into the river."
The Weber River feeds into the Great Salt Lake's Ogden Bay, a popular area for waterfowl hunting.
Fred Pehrson, assistant director for the Division of Water Quality, characterized the sewage bypass as a "routine" occurrence for sewage treatment plants in need of repair.
For the Weber district, it was the first time in at least eight years that raw sewage had been routed directly into the river, said district board chairman George Goodell.
Pehrson acknowledged, however, that 25 million gallons is a larger- than-usual amount of effluent.
Still, Pehrson does not believe any harm was done to the environment because of the dilution from the river's inflows and the filtering effect of the bay's wetlands.
"We don't expect there was significant impact to fish or any waterfowl, and we're not anticipating any," he said.
Regardless of the damage to the environment, Harris is concerned his agency had no time to comment on or review the matter. "To me, this seems like a case of it's easier to get forgiveness than permission."
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