The county’s headquarters were open — until a sewer pipe burst and stunk the place up
The third floor bathroom had flooded, and the stench of feces floated down the halls of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center downtown.
It took an army of workers in hazmat suits to drain the county’s headquarters after a sewage pipe burst Tuesday morning.
The mayor’s office sent home nonessential staff at noon, said Tara Smith, director of Internal Services, as she surveyed the halls in her blue rain boots. Workers described a revolting scene near the spill and in offices below, with raw sewage spilling out from the bathroom and beyond.
“It came through the ceiling into some offices. It was pretty bad,” said Audrey Edmonson, chairwoman of the County Commission. “Some people, if they touched something, they were sent home to take a shower for sanitary reasons.”
Edmonson said she expected to hold Wednesday’s commission meeting as planned, even if the bathrooms aren’t back in service with a temporary fix by then. She said the county would provide portable facilities for county staff and members of the public to use. “This is an old building,” she said of the Clark Center, which opened in 1985. “These things happen.”
“We’ve had problems with the toilet for a long time,” Smith said. “ And today the toilet backed up just like it would in your house.”
The building is so old, Smith said, when workers began fixing the line they found that tree roots had grown inside its water lines. One worker started pulling out muck and roots to clear it.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she exclaimed. “Buckets and buckets of muck and roots.”
The entire line will have to be replaced. Luckily, Smith said, the fixes will be paid for out of the $853 million that’s set aside for the county’s troubled water and sewer system. Smith said she wasn’t sure how long it would take to repair the whole system.
“If we didn’t have this funding source, we’d be patching,” she said.
In fact nearly 70% of the 41 buildings under Smith’s management are 40 years old. Many of these buildings probably have similar issues, she said.
Those employees left were told to use the bathroom downstairs because it’s on another sewage line, Smith said. The sewage from the upper restrooms would leak out of the broken pipe and further clog the system.
Some people went home because there were really long lines, said Andrea Rosaria, of the property appraiser’s office. Rosaria herself hurried out of the building at 4:30 p.m.
The smell has been “pretty bad all day,” she explained. She held her nose until the door finally slammed.
Miami Herald staff writer Douglas Hanks contributed to this story.
