High water levels have taken a toll on the Harrington wastewater treatment facility.
City officials contacted the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control March 3 and received permission to pump 10,000 gallons of treated water from a lagoon that they feared would overflow.
The combination of a wet fall, snowy winter and aging wastewater treatment system has resulted in Harrington’s facility dealing with twice the amount of wastewater it normally processes, said John Schatzschneider, city manager.
“It kept coming, coming, coming and we just got to the point where we had to do something,” he said. “It was a matter of preventing a catastrophe.”
Dr. Katherine Bunting-Howarth, director of the Division of Water Resources for DNREC, said the city was given permission to release more treated water from its wastewater treatment facility in order to prevent the lagoons from overflowing the berm and potentially flooding the area.
“Their lagoon levels were extremely high … they were concerned a breach would be imminent,” she said on March 4.
Schatzschneider said Harrington borrowed a pump from Kent County to move the untreated lagoon water into the wastewater treatment plant where it’s being treated and chlorinated before being released into the area waterways.
It basically comes down to the city being allowed to discharge more wastewater than it’s normally allowed to, he said.
And the discharge is far from raw sewage, said Rob Underwood, program manager for surface water.
“It is being pumped into the normal outfall — Browns Branch into the Murderkill,” he said.
From there, Bunting-Howarth said Harrington is monitoring the pollutants according to their permit and DNREC crews are monitoring both upstream and downstream to ensure there is no damage to it.
Bunting-Howarth said she expects Harrington to continue pumping “for a couple of days in order to get the water level of the lagoons down far enough so they can be confident of the structural integrity.”
The latest incident at Harrington’s aging wastewater treatment plant comes amidst the city’s initial effort to hook into the county sewer system. Harrington City Council March 1 unanimously voted to move ahead with a $5.18 million referendum to fund the hook-up. A public hearing will be held April 5 and afterwards council will set a date for a special election where the public ultimately will decide whether to borrow the money.
Schatzschneider said he realizes it’s going to be difficult to convince voters to approve the referendum, especially in these tough economic times, but they’ve reached a point where something must be done.
“It’ll be down to two options, either we keep what we have and not be able to discharge what we need to or hook into the county system,” he said.
