City officials know what caused 137 million gallons of untreated sewage to flow into the Tennessee River, but they still don’t have a concrete plan to deal with future spills, an engineer said today.
“It’s something we could not anticipate,” said Jerry Stewart, the city’s Waste Resources Division director. “What we think is we’ll expand our inspection program on all our electrical stuff. It’s a small thing where you get a break in the insulation, but it arced across (the power lines) and caused it to fail.”
A faulty piece of insulation caused one of the main power lines at the Moccasin Bend Wastewater Treatment Plant to short out Tuesday morning. The crippling charge spread down three major power poles and “fried the wiring” that maintains the city’s sewage system, Mr. Stewart said.
“Basically we’ll have a sit-down and look at how we might improve our inspections, but I don’t know if we could have stopped this,” he said. “Even if we were doing more frequent inspections, it’s a random thing that I don’t think anybody thought we’d have.”
The Tennessee Valley Authority released a total of 80 billion gallons of Sunday’s storm water Tuesday, which should nullify any hazardous effects the organic matter might have on the region’s drinking water supply, according to Mr. Stewart.