St. Pete optimistic that Irma won't trigger repeat of catastrophic sewage spills

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (WFLA) – After spilling or dumping around 200 million gallons of sewage during storm events last year, the last thing the City of St. Petersburg needs is another catastrophic mess.

To that end, city workers have spent a year and $66 million of your money expanding treatment, storage and disposal to ensure a disaster of that magnitude won’t happen again.

”Now we have 20 million gallons of emergency storage, where last year we had only eight,” said St. Petersburg Public Works Director Claude Tankersley. “We’ve lined over 100,000 feet of pipe and we’ve put in over 3,500 manhole inserts, so we’ve been doing a lot off work over the last 12 months.”

After a scathing state investigation of last year’s spills, the city promised to spend $326 million over five years to improve sewage and stormwater systems. That work is underway, but has a long way to go.

Tankersley tells 8 on Your Side he had a gut feeling Friday about Hurricane Irma and called in his staff during the holiday weekend to make sure everything is in working order.

“We met again this morning, twice, to make sure every pump is working, every tank is empty and everything is ready to go, and I’m confident we will be going into this storm fully ready, trained and ready to deal with it,” Tankersley said Monday.

The city now has two deep injection wells located at the Northwest and Southwest sewage treatment facilities to help increase storage and disposal capacity. Together with an additional 12 million gallons of emergency storage, the total capacity to prevent spills or dumping has increased by 30 million gallons.

Tankersley says that would be enough to stave off the kind of catastrophic spills St. Petersburg experienced last year if rain is equally distributed across the city, but still not sufficient to handle the kind of epic deluge Texans experienced last week during Harvey.

The bottom line is that Tankersley is optimistic about St. Pete’s ability to weather Irma, but offers no guarantees.

“You can’t predict nature,” Tankersley said. “It will always surprise us.”