The Truth Continues to Trickle Out About 2012 Sewer Leak

[XLFD]

Tomorrow, people throughout Ludington, and throughout the nation, will go to their polling place and vote.  A lot of people have been cajoled into voting for Republican candidate Donald Trump in order to 'drain the swamp' in Washington, to shake up a system that is so deeply ingrained in their own interests and in their own re-election efforts. 

In Ludington, our situation is similar, but the swamp in Ludington is more than just literal.  The PM Bayou was flooded not only with rainwater in 2008, but also with over 15 million gallons of sewer water from a ruptured sewer force main and a large section of Madison Street.  This had severe ecological consequences, but the City of Ludington failed to spend a dime to mitigate this issue as they repaired their street and sewer.

Over four years later, millions of gallons of raw sewage once again entered the PM Bayou, this time without a 100 year rain, just a ruptured sewer main which was finally caught several days after it began leaking into the subterranean ground near First and Adams Streets in the Fourth Ward.  Nothing else was given to the local media other than a leak occurred and was being repaired.  City Manager Shay had said the MDEQ had been notified and the amount of leaking sewage was “far, far, far less than what went in during the flood in (June) 2008.”

As noted in the article, Bypassing the Truth, whenever a sewer system has any significant leak there are three agencies that a sewer utility operator must notify when a leak has occurred:  1) the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) district office (or the Pollution Emergency Alerting System (PEAS) if the leak occurs after hours)  2) the local health department and 3) the local daily newspaper.  

In the defense of his actions taken, Ludington City Manager John Shay tried to claim that the city contacted both the health department and the DEQ, but supplied no evidence to the contrary.  The city's Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) operator in 2012, Rob Allard, who serves currently as the Pentwater Village Manager, sent an E-mail to Chansy (Sy) Paulik who worked for the DEQ, with John Shay carbon-copied. 

Further research has shown that Sy Paulik was not working for the district office of the DEQ in Cadillac that serves Ludington.  She had been, but this Sy Paulik reassignment.pdf (seen below) shows that she was working out of Kalamazoo effective since November 11, 2012, two weeks before the spill was detected. 

The notification procedures were definitely not followed.  It was definitely after hours so PEAS should have been called and an incident number could have been assigned, with DEQ officials coming into town to investigate the damage.  Sending a Sunday morning E-mail to a DEQ official who is not even working for the district office is not an alternative.  The record shows that Paulik did not do anything inter-agency with the 'notification' nor did she do anything later with the discharge report form, which stayed within her E-mail server until I asked for these records from the DEQ. 

It could be easy to shift the blame on her, but she should never have been the only official outside Ludington that was notified.  Allard and Shay had the duty to notify the PEAS or DEQ properly, Allard should have never just sent an E-mail to somebody he perhaps believed would take care of it discretely (and who did), and Shay should have knew that there was more to do.  That no contact was made with DEQ other than a discharge report form sent to Paulik one week later, and never entered into the DEQ records anywhere, seems to verify that the city and Paulik desired to keep the leak out of the public's notice. 

But according to the report, somebody from the city contacted the health department too (admittedly well beyond the 24 hour notification requirement) and received a notification that a two million gallon dump of raw sewage into recreational waters in the middle of Ludington didn't require E.Coli testing. 

But there is no record of such a contact, the city has not stated who in the health department made this waiver, nor has any health department official came forth to say they did.  No competent health department official given the parameters of this spill would have.  Allard and/or Shay lied about this.

City Manager Shay also claims now that there was never any bypass pumping into the PM Lake, but Shay made that statement at the November 26, 2012 meeting, recorded for posterity, it was entered into the record in the minutes that were approved at the next meeting.  Bypass pumping was done then, and he now currently wants us to believe otherwise:

Why the change of story?   Willful bypass pumping of raw sewage into a state natural resource is a major crime, as seen in the last section of The Sewage Hits the Fan.  What Shay allowed to happen has led to some people of Michigan to serve hard time and face severe financial penalties, such as David Kircher in his much smaller in scope offense detailed here.

If I am lucky enough to receive a majority of votes from my neighbors in the Third Ward tomorrow, I can more effectively 'drain the swamp' our city manager has been intent on making, and more effectively prosecute the city official(s) that let us all down, and start to work on a healing process of this often neglected area of our fair city. 

[Willy]

Unfortunately Shay is an non elected official who does not answer to the voters. As long as the Councilors choose to remain ignorant of what Shay is doing and even accomplices to his cover ups and lies then Ludington will remain a place that puts special interests above the needs of it's citizens and taxpayers.