Ludington Daily News Drops the Bowel (Movement)

[XLFD]

On April 7th, 2025 a sewer force main was ruptured by a private contractor at 10:00 AM.  The location was at Towns Brother Construction near the intersection of the PM Highway and Sixth Street, just outside the Ludington city limits and only about half a mile from the sewer pipe's destination:  the Ludington Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) at the east end of this map:

The twenty-inch-wide pipe at that location contains raw sewage from all over the City of Ludington and some of the surrounding PM Township, and rather than having 1100-1200 gallons per minute of untreated wastewater leaking around the Towns' property and interfere with 'patching efforts', WWTP Supervisor Chris Cossette apparently made the decision to divert the wastewater from three intermediate sewer lift stations (located respectively at the corner of Rath and Dowland, near the Washington Avenue Bridge, and in Conrad Industrial Park) into the nearby Pere Marquette Lake.  

The breach would be fixed a little more than a half day later, at 10:30 PM on April 7th, but by that time PM Lake would have an estimated 850,000-900,000 gallons of raw sewage in it from the three diversions.  

The Final Discharge Report, shown in part above, indicates when each of the three diversions started and ended along with the estimated discharge amounts, it also indicates the time when the local health department, the state EGLE Department, and the local newspaper were alerted to the leak.  As we see, both the DHD#10 and City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews) were alerted midafternoon on April 7th.  In a FOIA request for public records made by the Ludington Torch, such notifications were not verified by any written public record, meaning that the mechanism of notification was likely made as a phone call.  

When leaks like this happen, the wastewater utility is obligated by law to contact EGLE and both the local health department and newspaper of record.  The reason why the first two are contacted are pretty self-evident, it's in order to see whether procedures are followed, testing and investigations are made, and whether the public's health and safety is endangered. 

It's perhaps even more obvious as to why the local newspaper is contacted in such situations.  Such a medium can immediately get that information out to the public.  The COLDNews has all of the modern tools to let the public know immediately that their local lake is being polluted with 1200 gallons of untreated wastewater:  their own website, multiple social media outlets, email alerts, etc.  

The problem is that after they were contacted at 3:10 PM on April 7th, they totally dropped the ball in doing their duty to the public to warn them of the then-ongoing safety and health crisis affecting Ludington's primary recreational waterway.  The COLDNews goes to press at midnight, but this was not in the Tuesday paper, nor did it make it to any of their other electronic presences.  They were again notified that the bypass pumping had stopped at 9 AM on April 8th, but they would still ignore telling the public that it had even started for the rest of that day.  

Only in the April 9th newspaper did the aptly cold news policy of the COLDNews come to light, with their editor selecting a confused headline for that edition about a "water main crisis", when there never was a water main crisis:  

The reporter, Marco Iafrate, makes it clear throughout his story that it was a sewer main with wastewater that was ruptured and correctly reports the times when bypass pumping into the lake started and finished.  Why didn't the editor get this information out fresh on the afternoon of the 7th when they were the only media who were given access to news of the crisis?  

Managing Editor Lois Tomaszewski (above) made a major error in not notifying the public, when it mattered, about this wastewater crisis that put nearly one million gallons of raw sewage into PM Lake.  This is a disgrace to the journalistic profession, a dereliction of her duties to the public health and safety that she should have embraced when she was installed here in 2023.  

[XLFD]

In today's COLDNews, they had an article titled "Cossette explains water main incident from early April at City Coun..., where their illustrious editor, Lois Lame, is still claiming it's a water main incident with presumably drinkable water while her reporter at the meeting makes clear in the article that it was a sewer main leak where raw, untreated sewage was bypass pumped into a freshwater lake.  Probably a try to patch the damage, the article makes no reference as to why the COLDNews sat on the exclusive story for two days while the public's health was at risk.  

My grandson and several of his friends regularly fish from the PM Lake not far from where hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated wastewater were entering the lake, so while I am glad the WWTP supervisor addressed the issue and the COLDNews followed up, I'm still not happy that the public was kept out of the loop.  The records indicate City Manager Aldritch knew of the leak and the bypass pumping by at least early afternoon on the 7th, and passed the info along to city councilors.  As noted, the general public was never notified by the city of the sewer leak and during the time they put out two notifications they thought were more important than bypass pumping raw sewage into the lake:

[Freedom Seeker]

Disgusting ... loss of faith in City of Ludington for compromising the health of residents, visitors, environment to not have a quick plan in place for such emergencies to contain such spills.

Dismay and disappointment at City of Ludington to fail to notify the public for two days. Did they instruct LDN to "minimize" the alert?

[XLFD]

I would chalk it up as a simple editorial error if it happened once, but they had two separate reporters write stories about sewer ruptures and the need to bypass pump raw sewage, and the editor looked it over and put up a headline about a "water main crisis" and then a "water main incident".  In such a water main crisis/incident, the worst that can happen would be: 1) a water customer gets some flooding in their basement before someone turns a shut off valve, 2) one or more water customers losing water service temporarily, or 3) unadulterated water pouring out into a street/field leading to some puddling.  

The only reason I would read such a story would be to find out what the COLDNews defines as a water main crisis, most people would just look at a different story.  Sewer force mains are a whole different animal.  A pipe leak/rupture happens and you have biohazards accumulate in that area, and you can't just flip a shut off valve without having another place for the untreated wastewater to go.  I would like to see them have a better plan for such emergencies other than defiling the PM Lake. 

Had a community wide alert been issued, businesses like the House of Flavors could have suspended activities that create a lot of potentially harmful wastewater, residents could have withheld doing their laundry and dishes, postponed baths, showers, and even flushing their toilet until the crisis was solved.  If you reduce the flow to 300-400 gpm in the system, a combination of trucks and temporary reservoirs might prevent environmental contamination.

Dumping nearly 1,000,000 gallons of raw sewage, including industrial raw sewage, into two places on the PM Lake over a very short time can critically damage the delicate ecosystem in those two areas.  We can do better.

[Freedom Seeker]

I agree ... we should do better.

First of all I wonder how the contractor was so seemingly negligent puncturing the sewer main with all the Miss Dig marking services, scanning, etc.

Reading State and Federal requirements for sewage emergency remediation is interesting and worded but Lakeside communities especially, should have plans in place.

Shuting the water off would be the first thing, imo, to stop the sewage discharge. If water doesn't go in it can't go out and then shut the sewer valve before discharge.

Having bypass lagoons or emergency holding tanks in a system and on construction jobs would seem reasonable to avoid spilling into.the lake.  Let"s not think of those possible remediation scenarios (sarcasm)--as Wincewski said in effect ... the biohazard of nearly a million gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan cleared up in a couple of days, no problem .... That type of coverup thinking is one of the reasons why COL has the problems they do.

As far as the LDN editor ... if she doesn't know the difference between sewage and water, she should not be qualified to edit. Still thinking the COL minimized the problem behind closed phone calls so we don't upset the public

[Willy]

MAY THE POOH BE WITH YOU.