Kansas City wastewater plant sent millions of gallons of untreated water into Blue River
A Kansas City wastewater plant dumped several million gallons of untreated wastewater into the Blue River during a power outage over the weekend, KC Water officials said Monday.
The KC Water Blue River Wastewater Treatment Plant, at 7300 Hawthorne Road, was unable to treat the wastewater because of the power outage caused by overnight storms. Typically the wastewater is treated before it is introduced into the river.
During the power outage, an estimated 42.5 million gallons of untreated wastewater were believed to have gone into the Blue River, Heather Frierson, a spokeswoman with KC Water, said Monday. This is a rate of about 3.4 million gallons an hour.
The Blue River begins in Johnson County, Kansas, and flows across the state line before connecting with the Missouri River.
The outage began at about 4 a.m. Saturday, Frierson said. Crews were able to restore power in a little more than 12 hours.
The treatment plant, which treats more than half of the city’s wastewater, is Kansas City’s largest.
“The wastewater overflow was significantly diluted when it entered the Blue River due to the heavy rainfall,” Frierson said.
KC Water notified the Missouri Department of Natural Resources once the outage began, as is required.
Adam Paige, an environmental supervisor with the DNR’s regional office, said in instances like this, the main focus is on finding any “acute effects” caused by the untreated waste, which may harm human health and environmental health.
To determine that potential harm, samples of the water are tested for the presence of contaminants such as E. coli and ammonia. Paige said any next steps depend on the test results, which can take up to a few weeks to come back.
Frierson said she doesn’t anticipate any “clean-up” will be needed since the waste was so diluted.
“We generally advise the public to avoid waterways that have received wet weather overflows for a few days for the waterway to cleanse itself,” she said. “The Blue River in the area of the plant does not see much public use due to the land being privately owned by large industrial businesses with significant acreage.”
This is the third such incident in the past 20 years at the KC plant, said Frierson, who called the power failure event “rare.”
The most recent incident before this was in July 2019, when a 7-hour-long power outage sent an estimated 40 million gallons of “highly diluted wastewater and stormwater” into the same river, according to a news release from KC Water.
Much like Saturday’s outage, severe weather and storms also caused the July 2019 failure.
