JOHNSTOWN - A clogged sewer line in the area of Water Street and Pleasant Avenue on Monday caused a discharge of raw sewage and pretreated chemicals into a pond area of the Cayadutta Creek.
The sewage was cleaned up within hours through a team effort by local and state officials.
"We had the proper and correct response with the right equipment and that's what's important," Mayor Sarah Slingerland said today.
Authorities on Monday feared they had a bigger environmental problem on their hands when a city resident contacted the state Department of Environmental Conservation about 10 a.m. A greenish, smelly and foamy sludge appeared on the banks of the frozen creek near Simco Leather Corp.'s Pleasant Avenue plant.
After about four to five hours of work by the city Department of Public Works and investigation by various officials, the problem was fixed by late afternoon.
"There was a plug in the [city sewer] line," DEC Lt. Harold G. Barber said. "It was a backup. The city DPW unclogged it."
If the problem hadn't been fixed as quickly as it was, the situation could have been much worse, he said.
Barber said the material found in a pond of the Cayadutta leaked into the creek, but workers contained it. He said the material ended up being mostly sanitary sewage from the area mixed with pretreated chemicals legally discharged by Simco Leather. Sanitary sewage is material mixed with water inside the household, such as from sinks and toilets, and discharged into the municipal sewer system.
Deputy City Engineer Kevin Jones said today the city's sanitary sewer pipe became partially obstructed.
He said the city didn't know an old pipe was buried in the back of Simco's property in a wooded area where old tanneries once stood.
Jones said when the sewage backed up in the city line, the sewage went into the deteriorated old pipe, which the city didn't know was still connected to the current sewer line.
"Our line backed up and went to the old pipe and found a hole, which started it going into the creek," Jones said.
This morning, Jones said, the DPW was pumping the escaped sewage contents back into the city sewer system by order of DEC.
DEC officers at the scene Monday said Simco Leather - the Gloversville-Johnstown Wastewater Treatment Facility's seventh-largest industrial customer in 2011 - was at no fault in the incident.
The treatment facility is planning to look at some of the old pipes in the Glove Cities' sewer system. The sewer plant's $4.6 million budget for 2012 includes nine capital projects, including a $200,000 evaluation of the main sewer trunk running between the two cities, which the sewer line that was breached Monday on Water Street feeds into.
Slingerland said the city has old sewer pipes that sometimes get blocked. In her State of the City address in January, Slingerland said the city this year will put a "significant emphasis on a great deal of work on the city's aging infrastructure."
She said she was proud of the work Monday by city crews, which used the city's sewer jet. She praised the cooperative effort with the DEC.
"From our perspective, we have a very aging infrastructure," the mayor said. "From time to time, you're going to have events like this."
Simco Leather Co. owner Gerald Simek couldn't be reached Monday or this morning for comment.
The source of the discovered sewer sludge was an area about 20 feet down a hill, just off a wooded area on Pleasant Avenue near Water Street.
On Monday morning, bags of sludge were seen along the woods at the site.
DEC Officer Nathaniel Mead, lead investigator at the scene, worked with local officials to take samples from the sewage along the creek and from Simco's wet-well sampling station.
By early afternoon, the DEC?was still trying to identify the problem. Officials didn't know until later in the afternoon what exactly happened.
DEC contacted the city Fire Department initially, Fire Chief Bruce Heberer said.
Mead worked with sewer plant workers to identify the material that had gotten into the creek. City Department of Public Works crews flushed the sewer main on Water Street that leads to Pleasant Avenue.
The Fulton County Haz-Mat team, led by Fulton County Civil Defense-Fire Coordinator Allan Polmateer, placed booms and sand along the banks of the mostly frozen creek to initially contain the spill, which had a pervasive rotten-egg smell.
The Cayadutta Creek has gone through many changes over the past 30 years. It has been cleaned up and gone through reclassification. In the 1990s, it was reclassified by the state from a "D" stream to a "C" stream - healthy enough to support fish and other aquatic life. Tanneries used to dump chemicals directly into the creek, but that is now illegal. Companies must now pretreat their waste on-site before sending it to the Gloversville-Johnstown Wastewater Treatment Facility.
The last major killing of fish from an industrial problem in the Glove Cities occurred in June 2005 when DEC responded to an incident at Tradition Leather on West Eleventh Avenue in Gloversville. There, DEC investigators found up to 2,000 fish were killed in the creek.
