To find out about the sewage in your area creek or lake, you might not have to go any further than your front door. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities(CMU) will soon inform county residents of nearby sewage spills by hanging door hangers on their doors.Vic Simpson, a spokesperson for CMU, says he is designing the door hangers, which the utility plans to put into use soon. About six months ago, the Metropolitan Sewerage District of Buncombe County began hanging door hangers on residences near sewage spills to let people know what was going on and notify them of a public meeting scheduled to discuss the spill. The hangers were the result of a campaign by Buncombe County Health Center Director George Bond, who was concerned that folks might not realize the danger of what was floating past their homes.
State statutes governing notification of residents after a sewer spill only require that people be notified of spills over 15,000 gallons. Warning signs may be posted if spills occur to waters designated for swimming, but if the waters aren’t considered usable for that purpose, like most of the creeks and streams in Mecklenburg County, than no warning signs are posted after a spill. All that’s required is that the spiller publish a legal notice in the newspaper.
For Bond, that wasn’t enough. “We should recognize that nobody is going to read it!” Bond wrote to NCDENR in October 2001. “It seems to me that we need to mail out flyers to the residents.”
The specifics of the Mecklenburg County program haven’t been hammered out yet, but the hangers could contain information about a neighborhood meeting or warnings about the degraded quality of a body of water near a person’s home. In Buncombe County, a second set of hangers is placed on residents’ doors to let them know when the water is safe again.
Creative Loafing first raised the issue of sewage spills in Mecklenburg County after an investigation revealed that over 12 million gallons of raw sewage was spilled by CMU into the waters of Mecklenburg County between 1999 and 2001 in 815 separate incidents. Many of the larger spills the paper analyzed wound up in creeks and streams in subdivisions or residential areas. Despite the repeat nature of several large spills from the same pump station areas, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (NCDENR) didn’t fine CMU for a single incident, despite levying fines on businesses for much smaller spills.
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2002.
