Swimmers splashed in Paw Creek Cove. Nobody told them sewage spilled a day earlier.
As James Engle paddled his kayak up Paw Creek Cove on an early-morning fishing trip last Saturday, he noticed a strange smell coming from the water. It often smells a little odd near the sewage lift station nearby, so he kept going.
Then he noticed fish behaving strangely. They were bobbing their heads to the surface, sucking in air, and a few were flopping onto the banks of the creek.
“At that point, I decided to head back,” Engle, a resident of The Vineyards, a residential community around Lake Wylie, said this week.
As he paddled, Engle passed a party of a dozen people swimming in the cove. When he got home he found a post on his neighborhood Facebook group notifying residents of a possible sewage leak from the Paw Creek Lift Station, a wastewater plant about a half-mile up the creek from where Engle had been paddling.
One of Engle’s neighbors told the party of swimmers about the sewage spillage at around 11 am.
“I heard they got out of there so fast, it was like they were walking on water,” said Robert Mraz, a fellow resident of The Vineyards.
Warnings slow to come
The day before Engle’s paddle, last Friday afternoon, almost 850,000 gallons of raw sewage had spilled into the Catawba River near Old Dowd Road in western Mecklenburg County. The spill began while a private construction company hired by Charlotte Water was installing a sewer line, said Rusty Rozzelle, program manager for the county’s water quality unit.
Rozzelle said the construction company didn’t notify Charlotte Water about the spill until around noon Saturday. Charlotte Water, he added, didn’t notify Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, which includes Rozzelle’s team, until late afternoon Saturday.
News media were alerted at 11:57 a.m. Saturday, said Cam Coley, a spokesman for Charlotte Water. Updates were sent in the afternoon. But residents weren’t notified until around 6 p.m. Saturday in a news release on the City of Charlotte website, Coley said.
By that time, multiple people, unaware of the sewage spillage, had entered the contaminated water.
“Too much time went by before there was official notification,” Engle said.
Charlotte Water is looking into why the construction company responsible for the spill didn’t release that information earlier, Coley said.
“That’s something we are looking into internally,” he said. “Kind of a ‘What happened?’ ”
On Sunday, Storm Water Services put up three buoys near The Vineyards’ private boat ramp. Placed in the middle of the creek, the buoys’ lettering is illegible from more than a few feet away. That requires entering the water.
“Swim advisory,” they read.
There are no buoys at the mouth of the cove, Engle noted.
A map released by Mecklenburg County shows the area of the “No Swimming” Advisory for Paw Creek Cove extending from the Paw Creek Lift Station all the way downriver to Lake Wylie. This caused some confusion as to where it is safe to swim, Engle said.
Avoiding the same mistakes
That the construction company didn’t alert Charlotte Water and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services until about 12 hours after the spill started is very concerning, Rozzelle said.
“That’s terrible! It’s awful, it’s wrong,” said Rozzelle. “We need to learn from it to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Storm Water Services is teaming up with CharMeck Alerts, an opt-in notification system that sends texts and email updates on things like severe weather, waste collection services, fire department alerts, amber alerts, to include “No Swimming” advisories on the list of categories people can choose to add on their devices, he said.
Rozzelle acknowledged that the county also needs to purchase larger, easier to identify buoys so that swimmers are protected in the case of such a large sewage spill.
The results of water quality tests done Wednesday to ensure the sewage has been diluted enough to be safe for swimmers are due later Thursday, Rozzelle said.
Find updates on swimming advisories at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services newsroom site.
This story was originally published July 22, 2021 at 1:39 PM with the headline "Swimmers splashed in Paw Creek Cove. Nobody told them sewage spilled a day earlier.."