The sewage line runs along the side of a bridge on Albee Farm Road. The bridge, which  crosses over Curry Creek, is a hangout for neighborhood children, pre-teens mostly, who often fish, play and wade in the water under the bridge. The kids often climb onto the sewage pipes.

Budway had noticed kids playing at the bridge earlier, although they had all since disappeared. In their place was the horrific stench of raw sewage as polluted water from the sewer line escaped from the valve and covered the man-made embankment as it flowed into Curry Creek.

Budway went back inside his house and called the Venice Police Department. This would be at 11:45 am, according to police dispatch records. The police did not respond, but instead contacted the city's utilities department. The utilities department responded by sending out one unnamed worker, who assessed the situation and called for yet another utilities employee, who in turn shut the release valve approximately an hour to an hour and half after the VPD had received the call from Budway.

Utilities promptly notified the Sarasota County Air and Water Quality Protection Department, as required, and reported a raw sewage spill into Curry Creek of approximately 300 gallons. And then they packed up and went home.

Before leaving, though, they got a piece of Budway's mind. He was not happy. He wanted to know why a sewage release valve was left accessible and unlocked in an area where children frequent. Budway states he received shrugs and weak explanations about how difficult it would be to put a lock on that particular valve.

Neighbors, parents not alerted while utilities department deals with other distractions
Through the next few days, Bill Quigley, a city wastewater inspector, came out and did routine bacteriological counts in the water under the bridge. By Tuesday, the water was back to normal, according to Utilities Director John Lane.

In the meantime, nobody ever came out to interview Budway to determine the cause of the spill, not anyone from the utilities or the police departments. The valve was left as is, still unlocked. As for cleanup -- nada. Mother nature was left to clean the sewage remains from the embankment and from pipes on the side of the bridge.

Neighborhood parents were never alerted that a potential health threat was nearby. Nobody warned them to keep their kids away from the embankment area until the bacteria count went down. Most of the kids live on the north side of Colonia Lane in a low-income collection of trailers and shacks. Moreover, these kids live in the county, not in the city where the spill happened.

To be fair, the Utilities Department has had other concerns. A story had broken over the weekend about how the department had ordered, at city expense initially, a set of vanity street signs and had them placed on the grounds of the Eastside Water Treatment facility. Between trying to come up with a good spin on that story, meetings with the city and attorneys over a pending EPA criminal investigation into activities in the department, and meetings over Hunt's plans to privatize the department in a last ditch attempt to duck the EPA investigation, it's easy to see how they became distracted. They're busy folks of late.

The latest spin control on the street signs story is screamingly hysterical. It would seem, according to the usual anonymous sources, that a few employees have gotten together and are crafting a letter to the effect that the signs were their idea as a way of honoring their supervisors. Even City Manager George Hunt is reportedly shopping this story around. So lemme get this straight -- line employees have the ability to push through unauthorized purchases past their own department heads? This was a gift from the employees, even though the attempt was made to get the city to write the check?

The EPA investigation is still hush-hush, however there are indications that it is about to blow wide open in the next month or two. City officials are debating presently whether or not to pay for attorneys to defend their employees in the event of a grand jury and/or criminal charges. Meanwhile, I have received reports that EPA criminal investigator Dan Green is back in town, doing door-to-door home visits through the wastewater department's employee roster. When contacted earlier this week, Green would neither confirm or deny that any such visits had taken place.

Alright, enough -- what's the story here?
On Thursday morning, I started making some phone calls. Venice Police, Budway and the county's Water Quality Protection were first on the list. So was the City's Utilities Department, but nobody there was available to talk.

One set of questions I kept asking was: why was that valve left unlocked and why is it still unlocked?

The county said they didn't know as it wasn't their turf. Police Chief Jim Hanks stated he didn't know also, but he said he'd find out. Detectives were promptly dispatched over to the utilities department to find out what in the hell was going on. Budway, who really started this whole mess by picking up his phone, hypothesized angrily that it might have something to do with some heads that were stuck in some dark, warm and moist places.

The valve is secured... well, kind of anyway
A few hours later, I drove out to the scene of the spill to take some pictures and ran into Budway just as he was leaving for a doctor's appointment. He informed me that the city utilities folks had just come and gone in a hurry. They had come out to remove the valve handle.

Another retiree resident, Jean Jensen, took me over to the site of the spill and showed me the offending valve, now without its handle.

I wandered over into the neighborhood north of Colonia Lane. I spoke with a few kids and their parents. The parents were learning from me about the spill for the first time, while the kids acted suspiciously dodgy.

"Yeah, I sorta heard about somebody turning it on," one boy told me, hands deep in pockets as he nervously rocked left and right. Having been a kid prone to troublemaking myself, I instantly knew what that kidspeak translated to. It either meant "Yeah, I know who did it, can I go now?" or "The others made me do it, can I go now?"

I didn't press the issue.

The valve handle in question resembles the same handle that most folks have on their spigots or bibs on the outside of their homes, that little disc on the outside water tap that you turn to start the water flowing into your garden hose.  It is within reach, unprotected, in an area where kids aren't supposed to be playing. Kids, being kids, play there nevertheless, as though in harmony with a universal natural law. The valve is an irresistible, shiny, candy-like red button, to quote an old Ren and Stimpy cartoon.

That valve, to a bored and active twelve-year-old, is a valve just waiting to be turned.

Parents in the neighborhood seemed surprisingly unconcerned as a whole about the spill a block or so south and its health ramifications. After spending just a little time in the neighborhood, the reasons were abundantly clear: there's sewage all over the place. It's in the roads, in the yards and in the drain trenches along the side of the road. There's a lot of it in those trenches. The air is thick with the smell. There's no sewage lines running through the neighborhood, just often-overflowing septic tanks. Summer rains bring more of the toxic stew up and out of the ground. It is truly the most disgusting set of plots of land I have seen in this county.

Venice Florida! dot com stands by the story as written on this page.

On 05/31/03, the Venice Gondolier Sun reported on the leak, quoting Utilities Director John Lane as stating that the cause of the leak was due to a rupture.

The Gondolier also quoted Lane as stating that the valve was removed as part of the initial response on the day of the leak, in spite of the fact that the accompanying front page photo taken on the following Thursday or Friday showed the valve clearly still in place.

Furthermore, the paper reported that the city had plugged the pipeline, something that was news to residents of the Curry Creek condos -- their toilets were still working as of 10:00 am 05/31/03. If the pipeline was truly plugged, those folks would have been the first to notice it.

In a Venice Florida! dot com interview with Lane on 05/29/03 (some five days after the leak and prior to Lane's disclosures to the Gondolier), Lane never used the word rupture. In fact, Lane stated the department had no idea what had caused the leak and that they had not yet started an investigation into the cause. Lane stated that it was more likely that there was a failure in the valve.

Lane initially stated in the phone interview that the valve was up in the air, out of reach and inaccessible to children and passersby, and thus could not have been opened by anyone, a statement that is flat out untrue. When told that the valve was actually at shoulder height from the ground, Lane acknowledged the possibility that it might have been opened manually.

In that same Venice Florida! dot com interview, Lane acknowledged that the valve handle was in place, unsecured, at the time of the spill. He further stated he had no idea how many similarly unsecured valve handles were within city limits and thus under his purview.

Thus, it is our contention that Lane's statements as reported in the Gondolier are in direct contradiction with statements made by Lane to Venice Florida! dot com.

It should be noted that up until Venice Florida! dot com reported on the spill (which is actually a pretty small spill as sewage spills go), there was no attempt by the utilities department to let the general public know anything about it.

Neither the Gondolier or the Herald-Tribune knew there had been a spill on Saturday until we had called them the following Thursday to find out if and what they had heard about it. Both papers were helpful in our research, and we, in turn, shared much of our information with them.

Additionally, Venice Florida! dot com has learned that there apparently are state D.E.P. regulations that forbid release valve handles on sewage lines from being left unsecured, as was the case in this incident.

Inquiries with the county and with the D.E.P. have been made to verify this. If true, this would explain why the utilities department suddenly rushed to remove the handle after our phone inquiries as described in this story.

CLICK ON PHOTOS TO ENLARGE

The Curry Creek Bridge on Albee Farm Road

The air-release valve that caused the spill; note the missing paint where the handle had been removed just minutes before the photo was taken 

Sewage pipes attached to the bridge; note that the "fan" meant to block climbing is bent out of position

The view under the bridge, where youngsters often play and fish

John Lane returns my call
Around 4:00 pm, I received a return call from Utilities Director John Lane. By that time, most of my questions were already answered by others. Still, I wanted to know why the valve had been left unlocked, why was Budway not given a satisfactory answer to the same question, and why did it take my phone call to the cops almost a week after the spill to get the damned thing at least nominally secured?

Lane stated that the Utilities Department just had never thought in those terms. A deliberate spill by residents had never happened before, and Lane was still unconvinced that anyone had actually turned the valve to begin with. "Valves go bad on their own just from aging, and I'm not a big fan of those above ground air-release valves."

This particular valve seemed OK -- utilities workers had no problem shutting it off on Saturday after the leak, and it hasn't been dripping since. It looked to be in near-pristine condition, actually, the whole piping setup looked relatively new. I then shared with him my impressions from talking with some kids and their parents in the neighborhood, and he acknowledged that I might be right. "But that valve is up in the air, away from the ground, attached to the pipe."

"Well," I replied, "it's within reach for me, and the kids are climbing all over those pipes from what I've heard."

"They're not supposed to be." No argument there, but the kids haven't gotten that message so far, and it doesn't look like they are going to come to grips with that statement anytime soon.

As to the sewage in the neighborhood, Lane correctly stated that that is a county problem, not a city one. The area north of Colonia is adjacent to, but outside of, the city limits.

I asked Lane how many more of these unlocked sewage valves are within city limits, and Lane paused. "You know, I don't know. Maybe it's time to do an inventory of them and come up with a list so that we can rectify the situation."

This is, of course, assuming we can drag his employees away from legal meetings and sign-planting ceremonies.