St. Petersburg has spilled 2 million gallons of wastewater in the last three months
ST. PETERSBURG — Nearly 230,000 gallons of wastewater spilled from a tank Monday at one of the city's water treatment plants.
Those are just the latest of nearly 2 million gallons of wastewater to gush from city infrastructure in the last three months.
That includes an incident that stretched from August into September, when workers at another facility discovered that a line that should have sent wastewater used in the reclamation process back to the beginning of the plant for retreatment had instead been connected straight to the stormwater system. Over a period of 50 days, almost 1.7 million gallons of wastewater were inadvertently dumped into a nearby pond before the accident was noticed, according to the city's report to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Between those incidents, records show there were four other spills. The six discharges, which include three over a three-day period in October, are the latest examples of the city struggling to overcome the 2015-16 sewage disaster in which it released up to a billion gallons of waste — 200 million gallons of which ended up in Tampa Bay. They also come amid a change in the city's public notification practices: It no longer notifies the public about spills that don't leave facility grounds.