Heavy rainfall in Juneau this week caused untreated wastewater from a city pump station downtown to overflow into Gastineau Channel for several hours.
Chad Gubala, the production and treatment manager at the city’s wastewater utility, said heavy rain paired with a high tide overwhelmed the pump station along Egan Drive, which is currently undergoing a major reconstruction.
He said the potential environmental and human health impacts of the overflow are expected to be minimal to none. Samples of the water appeared to be very dilute.
“It went out once again in an area where there’s typically no human contact,” Gubala said. “It gets diluted very quickly, and it gets consumed by the natural microorganisms in our channel pretty quickly as well, and becomes part of the food chain.”
The approximately 160,000 gallons of discharge was a mixture of stormwater and wastewater, or sewage, that was headed to the Juneau-Douglas Wastewater Treatment Plant. But instead, it overflowed into the channel before being treated. The overflow happened twice, first on Wednesday for a brief 30-minute window, then again on Thursday, which lasted several hours.
Gubala said once the reconstruction project of the pump station is complete, overflows like this won’t likely happen again. The city notified the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation after the initial discharge.
The city is currently undertaking several reconstruction projects for its utility infrastructure as much of it reaches the end of its lifespan. Gubala said repairing and maintaining infrastructure now is key to preventing other accidents like this from happening in the future.
