FARMINGTON -- A decentralized sewer system that began overflowing last month near a golf course and a tributary of the Illinois River has had similar problems off-and-on for years, according to reports from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.
The department issued an emergency order to Washington County Owners Improvement District No. 5 on April 1 directing the district to stop discharging untreated wastewater and remedy any impact of the discharge. The system serves Valley View Estates, a neighborhood of about 400 homes surrounding The Golf Club at Valley View between Farmington and Prairie Grove.
The order required the district give documentation and photos showing the fix had been made by Monday. The department hadn't received that information by Thursday afternoon, spokeswoman Kelly Robinson said, but two inspectors met with a district employee on Wednesday to see what had been done.
The department's concerns centered around the sewer system's aeration cell, a shallow lagoon that holds wastewater for preliminary treatment. The water then goes through filtration and disinfection, according to the report from the Wednesday meeting.
Wastewater was overflowing from the pool onto the golf course during department inspections starting in mid-March, according to the department's online records. Levels of bacteria present in human waste were "alarmingly high" in the discharge, said Ellen Carpenter, chief of the department's water division, on Wednesday.
"That discharge and those samples that we took caused us to escalate this to an emergency order," Carpenter said. "They have some parts that are broken that they're trying to repair to bring themselves back in operation."
The course's cart path near the aeration cell was dry Thursday afternoon, and no overflow was visible. Fresh dirt dusted with lime, a substance that controls soil acidity, covered some sections of grass alongside the path.
Some faulty parts in the treatment system have been replaced, the department's Wednesday report states, but overflow continued on one side of the aeration cell that day, and the department will continue to track the district's progress.
No wastewater reached an unnamed creek that joins the Illinois River about 1.5 miles downstream and flows several hundred feet away from the aeration cell, Carpenter said.
Joe Stewart oversees the improvement district and has owned the golf course since 2004. He said Thursday the concerns were making "a mountain out of a molehill" and emphasized the golf course and improvement district were separate organizations. He said his attorney would release a statement to the press, but none was made by Thursday night.
In an email Tuesday to Washington County Attorney Steve Zega, Stewart's attorney, Audra Bailey, wrote, "Please rest assured, my client is as interested as anyone that this system work as designed." Zega released the email through a Freedom of Information request.
The improvement district notified the department "immediately upon discovery of the slight overflow of the lagoon after the last heavy rains," Bailey wrote, adding a "mass panic" was unwarranted. "The only hold-up is that, unfortunately, some of the replacement parts had to be fabricated, and it has taken a few weeks to obtain them."
Bailey said the system was designed in 2001 to serve three times the number of houses that have been built in the neighborhood, which means wastewater must build up in the aeration cell for a longer time before there's enough of it to move through the rest of the system. Carpenter agreed the system was under-capacity.
"It's not uncommon for a system like this that's designed for a lot of homes -- for a larger flow -- to have some compliance issues," Carpenter said.
The environmental department issued the system's current permit in 2011; it must be renewed next year.
Problems with the system go back at least a decade. The online report from a July 2005 inspection found the system was "out of compliance" but doesn't go into further detail. Later reports give more information.
In March 2007, for example, the department found the sewer system overflowed into a drainage ditch. Similar problems were found in 2008, 2012, 2013 and 2014, according to department records.
On the other hand, several inspections found no problems in 2006 and February and March 2014.
In July 2012, an inspector found parts of the system weren't functioning and the aeration cell wasn't being maintained well. The department fined Stewart $2,150 and required several improvements in a January 2014 consent administrative order.
Denis Dean, vice president of the Valley View Property Owners Association, said he's heard "rumblings" of annoyance over the system but mostly for its monthly cost, not the overflow concerns.
"The main complaint I get from people is just the existence of it and the fact that we're paying $40 for this -- basically a glorified septic system," Dean said.
Tying into Farmington or Prairie Grove's sewers could require resources the association doesn't have, he added. "The municipalities would have to help us out greatly. It's not an easy fix," he said.
NW News on 04/10/2015