In an emergency hearing in District Court Tuesday, the federal government asked to have a judge order the V.I. Waste Management Authority to stop dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into Cane Garden Bay on St. Croix.
Donald Frankel, attorney for the U.S. government, said WMA has dumped more than 50 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Caribbean since January, both into Cane Garden Bay and Long Reef, violating the federal Clean Water Act and a long-standing consent decree between the federal and local governments.
Tuesday’s hearing was in response to an emergency motion that federal prosecutors filed last week. It was unclear Tuesday what penalties the territory faces if Chief Judge Curtis Gomez orders a halt to dumping and WMA cannot comply.
While starting with an estimate that about 300,000 to 500,000 gallons of waste flow into the ocean each day, Frankel said he could have to revise that to a larger number after finding out through testimony Tuesday that not a single house pump or backup diesel pump is working at the Figtree pump station on the south shore.
The total might be closer to 1.2 million gallons of sewage a day after the last diesel backup pump failed at Figtree over the weekend, said Earl Haase, an engineer from WMA who testified Tuesday, delivering the bad news.
“At this point in time the entire flow from Figtree (pump station) is being bypassed into Figtree gut,” he said.
When working as planned, the Figtree pumping station should receive about 400,000 gallons of sewage from mid-island communities and about 1.3 million gallons from the LBJ pump station before it feeds it to the Anguilla plant for treatment. The territory has a permit to then pump treated sewage into the ocean a mile and a half offshore.
But both Figtree and the LBJ pump station near Christiansted have been plagued by pump failures and other problems that that have led WMA officials to bypass the stations and dump the raw sewage into the ocean instead.
Things came to a head in January when, after two of the main house pumps were disconnected to avoid damage at the Figtree pump station, the LBJ station could no longer pump its waste there.
Then, EPA engineer Pedro Modesto said Tuesday, WMA faced a “fielder’s choice.”
“You would have a situation where all over downtown Christiansted, out of manholes, you could have sewage coming out right in front of tourists and all over the streets,” he said.
WMA officials testified that instead of letting the sewage back up into the town, they bypassed as much as 1.3 million gallons a day out over Long Reef, which Modesto said was unauthorized and a violation of the Clean Water Act.
In the meantime, they said, the some 400,000 gallons flowing to Figtree from mid-island communities were bypassed into Figtree gut alongside the HOVENSA refinery, which leads into Cane Garden Bay.
“To minimize the load at Figtree so the diesel pump could keep up,” Haase said Tuesday, more than one million gallons of sewage a day were dumped over the Long Reef, close to the swimming beaches of Christiansted, between January and March 4.
Since the backup pump failed over the weekend, he reported a total failure at the Figtree site, meaning the waste from mid-island and LBJ are all flowing into the Caribbean.
Representing WMA Tuesday, Attorney Iver Stridiron said the V.I. government has been at the mercy of the vendor who sold the pumps to WMA and has not visited St. Croix in a timely manner to fix them.
At least two pumps are in Puerto Rico and one is in Florida being repaired, WMA representatives said Tuesday.
“It’s not a matter of money. We paid them,” Stridiron said after the hearing. “But what can you do when they won’t show up to fix what they sold you?”
Steve Aubin, the chief operations officer for WMA, said the failures were not a case of negligence or lack of maintenance. He said the pumps are sealed and very little maintenance can actually be done.
The federal government is also asking that the judge order the V.I. government to fix pumps at the Cancryn pump station on St. Thomas where only a single diesel backup prevents a similar sewage spill into Brewers Bay.
WMA Executive Director May Adams Cornwall is on deck to open testimony when the hearing resumes at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.
