A crew from the Needham Water, Sewer and Drain division of the Department of Public Works had to find and repair a sewer “force main” — a pressurized pipe used to move wastewater uphill — which was leaking in the natural easement area across the street from the sewer pump station at 257 West St. last week. In its required disclosure, the department wrote that the sewer line, which carries raw sewage, was leaking for 11.5 hours and discharged approximately 27,200 gallons of sewage before the team brought it under control.
“The leak was about 250 feet into the woods” and near Rosemary Brook, said Mike Retzky, superintendent of Water, Sewers and Drains. To repair it, the crew needed to bypass the broken section of pipe at the sewer pump station to keep the flow going while they did the work. He said the sewage is normally pumped from the sewer pumping station into the force main, which discharges the sewage into a gravity sewer main at the end of Rosemary St. on Highland Avenue.
“You can’t shut a pump station down,” said Retzky. “You’ll cause major property damage and flood out the station. So the pump station stays running.” Special Vactor trucks and septic trucks maintained the flow while the workers located the leak, excavated it, and repaired it. “We had five trucks there to maintain flows,” Retzky said. Crews didn’t wrap up until close to midnight.
The pumping station is part of the system that takes sewage from Needham and connects it to the MWRA sewage lines, ultimately sending it to the Deer Island sewage treatment plant.
Nature will have to absorb the waste that leaked. “There’s no remediation,” said Retzky. “You can’t pour chlorine in the brook. When things overflow, they overflow.”
“We notify everybody downstream. The brook goes into Wellesley, so we notify Wellesley. We notify the EPA and the (state) DEP.”
Unfortunately, he said, “this happens in communities all over Massachusetts. This isn’t unusual.”
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