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The troubled sewage-treatment program in Thomasville is just one of many wastewater systems that are the last barrier against environmental calamity in the region’s lakes and streams.

Operated by municipal governments, the 14 major plants in the eastern Triad face increasing expectations at a time their revenues are thinning, their customer bases are changing and their equipment is in constant need of maintenance or replacement.

The stakes are high: People want clean water, not just from taps at home or work, but also in streams near their neighborhoods or meandering across other parts of the Triad’s urbanizing landscape.

Treatment plants occupy the hot seat because state environmental officials have a long history of sending all manner of waste their way by urging industry and other private “dischargers” to tie into them.

“Over the past 25 years, we’ve pursued a conscious effort to consolidate dischargers,” said Steve Tedder, the state Division of Water Quality’s surface-water supervisor for the Triad. “We eliminated hundreds of dischargers.”

Thomasville’s plant showed just how high the stakes can rise when a public system is not properly maintained: A spill went undetected this summer from several days to a few weeks, spewing waste into High Rock Lake’s watershed in amounts ranging up to millions of gallons.

State officials rely heavily on municipal plants because they believe that by sending large volumes of waste to such central locations, cities will earn enough money from user fees to operate bigger plants with larger, better-trained staffs and more sophisticated equipment.

Mistakes the size of Thomasville’s are uncommon, but smaller ones are not. Tedder’s office investigates 20 to 45 spills a month, most between 100 and 1,000 gallons.

“Problems will occur,” said Tedder, whose office supervises 15 counties from Caswell and Alamance into the mountains. “If it’s machinery, it will break. If man runs it, mistakes will be made.”

Out of sight, out of mind?

Keeping a plant operating cleanly and efficiently carries a stiff price tag, said Eric Davis, Burlington’s water and sewer operations manager.

“Money is a challenge for anyone in this business,” he said.

Stepped-up maintenance of the many miles of underground lines carrying raw sewage to each plant is the newest burden, Davis said.

Failure to do that properly caused Thomasville’s big spill, for which Tedder’s office recently levied a $35,000 fine.

“It’s a new level of maintenance that hasn’t been done in the past,” said Dennis Asbury, director of Eden’s environmental services department, whose community is finishing a $7 million upgrade of its lines. “The tendency when you bury something in the ground is to just forget about it.”

Greensboro spends roughly $3 million a year maintaining its lines. Last year, it finished a $46 million project to rebuild parts of the huge system feeding into the city’s North Buffalo plant, so leaky it spilled raw waste in Latham and Lake Daniel parks whenever it rained heavily enough.

High Point is investing more than $140 million in its two plants, including $67.2 million in the underground “collection systems.”

Meanwhile, a number of communities saw water and sewer revenues plummet as textile and furniture industries departed in recent years, making treatment-plant upkeep harder to afford.

As much criticism as manufacturers received for damaging the environment, they also provided money for cities to keep public utilities updated.

Thomasville, for example, didn’t get into its mess willingly. The cost of line improvements was prohibitive because — in step with the city’s loss of industry — the municipal plant went from treating 3.2 million gallons of waste a day in the 1990s to about 2 million gallons now.

“Just think about trying to run a business with a third less customers,” City Manager Kelly Craver said.

Leaders decided to defer the line work and borrow $27 million to upgrade Thomasville’s sewage plant, which was being fined repeatedly by the state for failure to properly treat effluent before releasing it to North Hamby Creek, Craver said.

Stepped-up enforcement

Critics think North Carolina’s waters would be better protected if state regulators got tougher with cities and private companies that pollute.

Problems like those in Thomasville are the natural outgrowth of too much leniency by state regulators, said Hope Taylor, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Water for North Carolina.

“They continue to assess very tiny penalties for almost everything,” said Taylor, pointing to the $35,000 fine for Thomasville’s big spill. “That’s a paltry amount for a spill lasting days if not weeks.”

State regulators see it another way. The state issues a lot of small fines because it jumps quickly on any infraction, said Susan Massengale, spokesman for the Division of Water Quality.

“We’re usually able to address problems with small fines before they become big issues,” she said.

Others question North Carolina’s honor-system approach to problems with a plant: City officials are to report their own violations of the Clean Water Act to Tedder’s office.

Human nature is to downplay the infraction, said Yadkin Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks, who triggered an ongoing investigation when he alerted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that Thomasville might have wildly underestimated this summer’s huge spill in its initial report.

“I’ve always believed that when you hear of a sewer spill, it’s probably under-reported,” said Naujoks, whose territory includes High Rock Lake.
But plant technicians bristle at suggestions they might twist the facts or even fudge a little.

“Yes, we send in reports that say, 'Fine me, please,’ ” said Martie Groome, Greensboro’s supervisor of industrial waste and lab services. “I’m very proud of my staff. We tell it like it is. I will fire anybody who doesn’t.”

How they’re doing

As a group, major treatment plants in the Greensboro area have a decent record of compliance with state and federal clean-water rules.

Thomasville is the only community with a large tally of state fines; more than $222,000 since 2004 for deficiencies in wastewater treatment and another $71,000 for spills.

Tedder’s office issues most fines for two kinds of infractions: spills of raw sewage before it reaches a plant and too much of any pollutant in a plant’s treated wastewater.

Fines for spills of raw sewage are pretty straightforward; you get a lot if you’re not properly maintaining your lines by keeping them clear of grease clumps and other blockages and by replacing sections too old, damaged or small.

But the other type of fine — for pollutants — is not a good way to judge one plant’s performance against another, said Terry Houk, High Point’s assistant public works director.

That’s because each plant is held to different standards of performance by the state, he said. Standards are based on the size of the river or creek that receives a plant’s treated wastewater and on that stream’s pollution problems.

So one plant might have a threshold for nitrogen, phosphorus or other contaminants two to three times lower than another, Houk said. And the lower the limit is, the more technologically difficult it is to hit the target, he said.

“All I know is my limits keep getting tighter and tighter,” Houk said of High Point’s two plants, one of which discharges to a tributary of Randleman Reservoir soon to provide drinking water for the region.

Technicians also face hurdles avoiding fines because each plant is at the mercy of whatever comes down the line, even though industrial customers are forbidden from putting high concentrations of harmful chemicals into the system.

“An industry can discharge something on us and we don’t know what it is,” said Allan Williams, Greensboro’s director of water resources.

All at once, the plant isn’t responding properly and its operators must react quickly with the right mechanical, biological or chemical adjustment. Not a task for the ill-informed or poorly trained, Williams said.

Among the plants, Greensboro’s Osborne facility was the second-most heavily fined in the last five years. But much of the plant’s $44,673 in fines arose from two situations in which neither plant equipment nor employees were to blame, said city lab supervisor Groome.

In one case, the limit on cyanide — which can be a hazardous chemical — was set so low, it was too small for accurate measurement in the plant’s treated water, she said.

So the plant was fined repeatedly for test results that falsely showed excessive cyanide until the city hired a consultant for $70,000 to prove the tests inaccurate and demonstrate why, Groome said.

The Osborne plant also was fined when its treated water tested high in cadmium, a toxic metal used primarily in plating and battery making. Plant technicians painstakingly traced the contaminant to a company that was dumping it in the sewer, then fined the firm more than enough to recover the state penalties, Groome said.

Most plants are run by people who work hard and try to do the right thing, Tedder said. Still, every so often, mistakes happen.

“The issue is how fast you address it,” he said. “It’s how well are you equipped to respond, how fast you respond and how effectively you respond.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com