Raw Sewage Dumps Into River On Yellowstone's North Boundary

By Josh Mahan

State DEQ Fails To Regulate Illegal Sewage Lift

GARDINER, Mont. – Watch for the flashing red lights on the sewage lift stations here at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River.

When one lights up it means that unscreened raw sewage is spilling out of a 12-inch, white PVC pipe and into the river violating the state Water Quality Act, a serious legal violation by the Gardiner Sewer District that hasn’t been enforced by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

From out of the pipe an assortment of tampon applicators, condoms, syringes, dead rats, hair brushes, shampoo bottles, lighters, wads of toilet paper, and actual raw sewage spill down a steep rocky bank and into the Yellowstone River. It’s straight from the toilet to the river with no stops in between.

These discharges of sewage from Gardiner and Mammoth have been happening for decades, including a three-day spill in the late 1990s that dumped 220,000 gallons of waste into the river.

The most recent discharge, a 2,600-gallon release, happened earlier this summer on June 27 in the middle of the afternoon, and forced some commercial rafting outfits to cancel their float trips. The site of the recurring discharges is the notorious Water Street lift station, located on Yellowstone National Park’s boundary. The stretch of river the sewage spills into is a popular commercial whitewater and fishing stretch known as the “Town Run.”

The lift station requires power to lift sewage from Mammoth and part of Gardiner high enough to allow it to gravity feed into the town’s settling ponds. But the station’s backup generator is under-equipped and doesn’t kick in automatically, even though the sewer district’s state water discharge permit requires that they have back-up power to prevent discharges into surface water. Whenever the power goes down in Gardiner, or if mechanical failure occurs, the sewage spills straight into the river until the generator can be started manually.

Gardiner Sewer District Manager John Wahoff said he knows the system is “100 percent illegal,” but neither the state nor county has made him change it, so he hasn’t.

Wahoff and Park County Director of Environmental Health Randy Taylor both admit that discharges of sewage are not desirable, but they counter quickly that it’s not something to worry too much about because the river has so much water in it that it dilutes the sewage and the solids. They don’t notify residents or river runners when a discharge occurs.

“I’m not required to, so I don’t,” Wahoff said.

Big Sky Whitewater owner Cory Ackerman was alerted to the June 27 spill by a friend who works for the state. He then alerted Gardiner’s other commercial rafting outfits to the spill and potential danger.

Ackerman said he wants the county to alert people when the discharges occur, so that clients can be notified.

“We should be warned by the health department or some governmental organization to ensure that people don’t get infected with sewage waste,” Ackerman said.

Taylor ultimately notifies the public if he feels the spill poses a health threat. But he doesn’t see the raw sewage as a public health hazard. He would rather not think of the syringes, saying that he has faith in the medical community to properly dispose of needles. But Taylor did admit that syringes from intravenous drug users could slide out of the pipe at Water Street.

“There’s all the cows pissing in the river. You turn loose a tenth-of-a-gallon of raw sewage and people get upset,” Taylor said. “I can’t think we can hurt much up there. I think that’s what the DEQ thinks, too. There’s just so much water going by.”

Ed Coleman of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s Enforcement Division disagreed. “A discharge of untreated wastewater into state surface water is a violation of the Water Quality Act, and a pretty serious one,” he said. Violations are punishable by fines reaching up to $10,000 per day. Any discharge is too much, Coleman said, let alone thousands of gallons.

So how did Gardiner slip through the cracks for decades and get away with dumping their sewage straight into the Yellowstone River every time the lift station’s power failed?

It took a water quality specialist at the DEQ to sit on the spill reports, a national park to ignore where its sewage was going, an uninterested county commission, a part-time sewer operator working with outdated equipment, and a county health director who thought it wasn’t a big deal.

The DEQ is a big organization. The Enforcement Division relies on agents within the department to send enforcement requests for action.

Coleman and the DEQ Enforcement Division have never levied any fines or forced Gardiner to cap its sewage pipes that are pointed at the river because the Water Quality Discharge Permits Section hasn’t passed down any official enforcement requests.

DEQ Water Quality Specialist John Wadhams has handled at least two of the Gardiner Sewer District’s spill reports.

Sewer Manager Wahoff said he likes to report the spills to Wadhams.

“He knows about this lift station,” Wahoff said. “That’s the reason I wanted to call and talk to him. He was involved in the last violation, so keep a little continuity going.”

It is Wadhams’ job to determine when a violation has occurred, then pass the information onto Enforcement. But in late July, Enforcement said they hadn’t received word of the violations.

Wadhams has since been notified by his supervisor that he had until Aug. 4 to get an enforcement request to the Enforcement Division.

The DEQ record of the Gardiner Sewer District’s frequent discharges into the river is limited. Wadhams read the file over the phone. It has three recorded spills: June 14, 1998; August 3, 2003; and the most recent spill on June 27, 2006.

But according to Wahoff and Gardiner residents who live near the pipe, spills occur every time the power goes out, which is frequently. In years past, before the backup generator’s purchase, residents had to wait for power to be restored before the sewage stopped flowing.

“They had a spill because of a power outage [in the past], so we made them get a generator,” Wadhams said. “We didn’t force the back-up power issue. This time we will force the back-up power issue.”

That generator was purchased by the Gardiner Sewer District’s biggest client, Yellowstone National Park. All of the waste from Mammoth Hot Springs’ hotels, laundry service, and park employee housing flushes downhill to the Water Street lift station. The Park’s purchase was intended to stop the spills. But they neglected to get an automatic start switch.

The Park is distancing itself from the lift station malfunctions now.

“It is a Gardiner and Park County issue, Park Spokesman Al Nash said. It’s not our jurisdiction or our system.” He was unwilling to comment on the Park purchasing the under-equipped generator.

Wahoff is also a full-time employee of the Park, working in the plumbing shop. He works part-time as a contractor for the county to manage the sewer district. He says his response time to Gardiner to manually start the generator takes about a half-hour.

Ultimately the responsibility for managing the sewage system in the unincorporated town of Gardiner belongs to the Park County commissioners.

“It’s just a matter of the commissioners saying to do it,” Wahoff said of inserting the automatic start switches into the lift stations.

The funds are available in the Gardiner Sewer District’s budget, according to Wahoff, though the project would wipe out reserves.

The last commission couldn’t, or wouldn’t, clean up the discharges, and the current commission says that they were unaware of the violations.

“This is the first we’ve been advised of this,” said Commissioner Larry Lahren.

Lahren says that the problem is that the county commission is disconnected from the Gardiner Sewer District. The people who work there aren’t direct county employees who report to the commission every day, so you get a lot of second-hand information, Lahren said. An investigation, launched by Lahren, as to the function and structure of the Gardiner Sewer District was recently finished, though it didn’t analyze the environmental impacts of the district.

“This is just one of the many things that we inherit. We will definitely get it corrected in this administration, you can take my word for it,” Lahren said. “There will be heads rolling if need be. This is the first that I have been advised of this. But I can assure you it will be fixed.”

Ray Corbin and Stephanie Cochrane have owned a residence a stone’s throw from the Water Street lift station for twenty years. The couple tried to work with the former Park County commission.

“In the past, the spills would go on for days,” Corbin said.

Corbin says that he and his wife called the Park County commissioners five to seven years ago after a major spill. One official came down, looked at the pipe with Cochrane and told her that there was nothing the commission could do about it.

“John [Wahoff] has been prompt to come down and service the generator. But nobody has ever offered to clean up the mess,” said an outraged Corbin, who has found syringes, amongst other things, scattered around the area. Corbin’s dog gets into the raw sewage whenever the pipe flows and comes home covered in the mess and tracks it around the property. A month after the last reported spill debris still littered Corbin’s property.

Cochrane is upset that the discharges are illegal and nothing has been done. She assumed that the sewage spills were protocol and couldn’t be helped.

“I assumed they knew what they were doing,” Cochrane said. “But one should never assume.”

Corbin and Cochrane aren’t the only residents of Gardiner whose property has been contaminated by the sewer district. Bill Parrilli, a lifelong plumber who used to work in the Park’s plumbing shop, has had his land contaminated by the settling ponds north of town.

With no grate system on the ponds ravens wreak havoc on the sewage solids, pulling out all of the nasty stuff people flush down the toilet and strewing it across Parrilli’s 2.2 acres on the Yellowstone River. The district’s answer to the ravens is to fire a sound cannon, positioned on Parrilli’s property boundary, over the pond. The district has also left debris, like used sewer liner, on Parrilli’s land after construction projects.

Over the years Parrilli has seen plenty of leaky pipes in Gardiner, as well as flat-out discharges as the operational mode. Parrilli worked under the sewer operator before Wahoff and straight discharges were standard operation because the back-up generator wasn’t even in place, he said.

Just weeks ago, on city property adjacent to Parrilli’s, a private contractor working on a water main found a sewage pipe that had been leaking underground for years. According to Parrilli, Wahoff told the contractor just to patch it with some sheet metal and cement. The contractor told Wahoff they had to do it right and fully repaired the pipe. The contractor confirmed the story, though he was unwilling to go on the record.

Not many people are willing to talk on the record of the sewer problems. People say it’s too small of a town, and reprisal abounds. But you don’t have to go far to find a story of a problem with the sewer; whether it’s improper hook-ups, building on sewer easements, leaky settling ponds, or a host of other issues stemming from incompetence.

“There’s a law that says plumbing has to conform to national codes,” Parrilli said. “My whole life has been plumbing. For me to come here at this point in my life during retirement and watch a town and the federal government trashing the Yellowstone River makes me sick.”

Literally.

Parrilli has Hepatitis C. It can’t be determined where he contracted it, though his land next to the settling ponds is a candidate. He has a legal case pending.

“These people don’t need to lose their jobs, they need to go to prison,” said Parrilli.

The silence surrounding the sewage discharges has been the driving force behind the continuing violations.

Yellowstone Raft Company owner Julia Page has heard of the spills over the years, but she never knew the details. She was upset to find out that all that was needed to stop the spills was an automatic start switch.

“It’s very disagreeable to have raw sewage going into the river if all it takes is an automatic switch to solve the problem,” Page said. “That sounds like something we need to talk about and get fixed. This river is a gem and it deserves the best protection we can give it.”

During the course of this story Josh Mahan learned that raw sewage pollution happens often in Montana, but rarely is scrutinized eventhough the effects are serious. Find out how the waste in a treatment system near you is being managed.