Miami-Dade County’s antiquated sewer system has ruptured at least 65 times over the past two years, spewing more than 47 million gallons of untreated human waste into waterways and streets from rural South Miami-Dade to the ritzy condos of Brickell Avenue to the Broward County border.
The breaks and blowouts — topping out at nine in a single stinky month last October — were documented in nine warning letters that state environmental regulators sent to the county’s Water and Sewer Department between June 2010 and April.
The letters, warning that the county could be on the hook for “damages and restoration’’ and civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, were the catalyst for ongoing negotiations with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Justice and Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The talks are expected to end with a legal settlement committing the county to a multibillion-dollar plumbing repair plan — and probable customer rate hikes.
The letters lay out more dirty details of “unauthorized discharges’’ not included in a 78-page draft consent decree released last week that declares the county in violation of federal water quality laws, in large part because some of the foul spills drained into canals and Biscayne Bay.
Many of the leaks from the county’s 7,500 miles of lines were relatively minor, posing minimal traffic disruptions and public health concerns. But at least eight topped 100,000 gallons. Six more released more than 1 million gallons of raw sewage from rusted valves or cracked concrete-and-steel pipes that county engineers acknowledge had long out-lived their intended life span.
The worst problem by far, according to the DEP letters, is the county’s aging Central District Wastewater Plant on Virginia Key, which is designed to discharge partially treated sewage out a pipe more than a mile off shore. State records show that between October and December 2011 four separate failures sent a total of more than 19 million gallons spilling from the plant.
The largest at Virginia Key, on Oct. 9, spilled 17 million gallons of raw sewage.
Doug Yoder, the Water and Sewer Department’s deputy director, blamed it on a broken pin holding a filter screen used to divert “chunks of stuff” from the liquid flow. Once the pin failed, the thick solids built up, triggering a massive back-up that forced workers to shut down that plant and divert incoming sewage to another site, causing even more of an overflow.
The public never heard about that failure, Yoder said, because “nothing actually left the plant site. The overflow went into the storm drains, then back to the plant.”
But three weeks later, on Oct. 31, another million gallons of partially-treated sewage spilled out a relief valve into surrounding bay waters, forcing Miami-Dade to issue no-swimming advisories. That was triggered by a power outage that shut down a pump as operators shifted from a generator to the power grid.
Yoder conceded operators have a difficult task at Virginia Key, the oldest and most decaying of the county’s three plants. It handles some 25 million gallons of raw sewage a day from Surfside, Bal Harbour and Miami Beach. The county has mulled replacing it, which would cost $500 million — money Yoder said the department doesn’t have. He also acknowledged the department has resisted pouring a lot of repair money into a plant it hopes to replace.
“We want to avoid spending a lot to keep it running if we’re going to take it out of service,” he said.
The federal enforcement action isn’t the county’s first. In 1996, Miami-Dade paid a $2 million fine — at the time the largest ever for a U.S. Clean Water Act violation — and agreed to expand the capacity of a system that was constantly pouring raw sewage into the Miami River and Biscayne Bay.
Since then, the department estimates it has spent some $2 billion on upgrades but hasn’t come close to covering needed fixes for a system in which many pipelines are approach a half-century in age or even older.
Blanca Mesa, an activist with the Sierra Club who has raised concerns about the county’s plans to replace only one segment of an aging and fragile sewer pipe under Government Cut, said the failures point to a long history of ignoring problems and putting off proper maintenance. She said today’s problems echo failures detailed in a 1991 grand jury report documenting sewage spills into the Miami River.
“Somebody has to understand we have to set the right priorities in this county, and we haven’t been doing that for a very long time,’’ she said.
Miami-Dade Commission Chairman Joe Martinez agrees the county has to find a way to pay for the repair work. One option might be to issue bonds, Martinez said, but he would insist that property tax bills don’t rise for residents as a result. Martinez said it’s possible that any increase in bond debt would be offset by a decrease in the property tax rate, if home values rise this year, as he expects.
“We’re going to have to wait until the tax rolls come out,” he said. “We definitely need to fix the infrastructure, but we must gain people’s confidence that [the money] will be used for that.”
Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he is waiting to learn how much money the county would need to spend before committing to a financing plan. First he would look to reduce water department costs, he said, then possibly enter some type of private-public partnership.
“The last thing we want to do is put any kind of burden on the public,” he said.
Past political decisions have compounded the sewer department’s problems, by cutting into reserve funds that could have helped finance the system upgrades.
Historically, county leaders tapped water department funds for other departments struggling to make ends meet. Though that practice stopped in 2007, last year the Water and Sewer Department still “loaned’’ $25 million to the county’s general fund to help balance the books. Payback is scheduled to begin in 2014, at $5 million a year.
Right now, the department has three reserve accounts. One is required to maintain a 60-day reserve, or $55.7 million. Another is expected to have about $30 million by the end of this budget year in September. A third is empty.
Another type of reserve account intended for unexpected repairs maintains between $50 million and $60 million each year — a fraction of the repair bill that county engineers estimate could run into the billions.
Adding to the problem, county commissioners and mayors have repeatedly resisted raising what rank as some of the lowest water and sewer fees in the state — though they did boost it 4.7 percent last year. The average homeowner pays about $135 quarterly, according to the county.
Miami-Dade certainly isn’t alone in struggling to mend its leaky and aging sewage system. Most major cities in the United States have similar problems. The EPA estimates there are 240,000 water and sewer main breaks across the country each year, and puts the price tag at hundreds of billions of dollars.
In Broward County, for instance, state regulators say sewer failures have sometimes drawn scrutiny but not a similar sweeping state-federal enforcement case. Waste there is handled by 28 different utilities with much smaller and generally newer systems. Miami-Dade’s system is the largest, and among the oldest, in the state with huge pipelines carrying large volumes over long distances.
Alan Garcia, director of Broward’s wastewater and water services, said less than 3 percent of the county’s 7 million feet of pipes is older than 50 years. About 40 percent of the county’s breaks are construction related, he said.
“We do an aggressive job of monitoring our pipes,’’ he said.
Jennifer Diaz, a Florida DEP spokeswoman, said Miami-Dade hasn’t tried to cover up its problems, acknowledging in an April 2011 “self assessment’’ sent to the EPA that numerous breaks were putting the county in violation of the U.S. Clean Water Act.
The DEP opened its own enforcement case against Miami-Dade in 2009. But the following year, after consulting with the EPA and Miami-Dade, all the parties agreed to draw up a joint state-federal consent decree that acknowledges “improper’’ management and maintenance practices.
In a written statement, Diaz said the spills “are mitigated by Miami-Dade to the greatest extent possible.’’
Still, the potential failure of some key pipelines could have disastrous consequences. Earlier this year a consultant warned that the sewer main running under Government Cut to Virginia Key was so brittle it could rupture at any time. It was constructed from pipe made by a now-defunct company named Interpace, whose notoriously defective products have been linked to a number of major failures.
Though county engineers maintain the pipeline remains safe for daily use, department director John Renfrow acknowledged an unexpected failure would be “catastrophic,” spewing tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay.
His warning echoes one issued exactly two decades ago about potential sewer line breaks by a Miami-Dade grand jury appalled by environmental and other conditions in the Miami River.
“The Miami River and Biscayne Bay would experience the worst environmental catastrophes in modern history,’’ the 1991 report warned. “The detrimental impact of a spill of this type and the cleanup and mitigation costs are incalculable. If we are seriously concerned about the bay, we must address this known environmental hazard now.’’
Miami Herald staff writer Carli Teproff contributed to this report.
