Lightning blamed for Clinton’s sewage overflow into river

By CRISTINA TRAPANI-SCOTT

CLINTON — The Village of Clinton continues to work at finding the exact cause of a wastewater treatment plant system failure that caused a sewage spill into the River Raisin late last week.

The Lenawee County Health Department issued a water advisory for the River Raisin extending from the Village of Clinton through the Village of Deerfield last Friday. The advisory cautioned residents to avoid physical contact with the River Raisin in that area, but stated that it did not apply to public or private drinking water supplies.

Village Manager Kevin Cornish said Clinton Department of Public Works employees believe that it was lightning that caused an electrical surge at the plant. He said the spill occurred after the transformer at the plant blew and didn’t switch to a second live transformer.

The DPW crew did act immediately when an alarm indicated power failure. “They did a manual override, but the good transformer didn’t engage or power up,” said Cornish.
He said that it only took the crew 15 minutes to get power restored. During the outage, the plant lost 300 gallons of wastewater that went into the storm drain and spilled into the river.

Cornish said the village has a local electrician on site evaluating why the manual override failed to engage the transformer. “We have no solid answers right now,” said Cornish. He said the village wants to rule out a couple of possibilities before turning to the electrical contractor who originally installed the system.

Clinton’s new wastewater treatment facility went online in June of 2006. A contamination previously was reported in August of 2006, not long after the plant opened, that was the result of a warning system failure. The village is in the process of having a back up generator installed at the plant. Cornish believes that the generator may not have helped in this situation because of the failure of the manual override.