Oooh that smell - can't cha smell that smell?
Saturday morning during a Memorial Day weekend. Retiree Gary Budway was sitting in his condo on Settlement Road (map) when he noticed a terrible smell permeating not only his house but his entire neighborhood. Further inspection revealed the source -- an open release valve on a sewage line less than a couple of hundred feet from his home.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.
