By KEVIN NEVERS

Here’s the good news: the baseball field at Chesterton High School is apparently only partially responsible for the flooding which plagued residents of the Tanglewood subdivision during the rains of Jan. 7-8.

Here’s the bad news: the Town of Chesterton’s sanitary sewer system is being infiltrated—no one knows quite how or where—by much more stormwater than anyone had previously thought.

So the Stormwater Management and Utility Service Boards learned at their respective meetings Monday night.

Begin with the Tanglewood problem, which Mary Ivanovich brought to the Town Council’s attention last week, after her rear yard, then her basement, filled with water which she believed to be gushing from the CHS baseball field to the west. In fact, Street Commissioner John Schnadenberg told the Stormwater Management Board, by far the greatest cause of the flooding was a breach in a stormwater pipe in the Ivanoviches’ rear yard made by Comcast when a crew replaced a cable within the last year. That pipe subsequently filled with dirt and debris and was “a big part of the problem,” Schnadenberg said.

Then, he added, elsewhere in the neighborhood, where that pipe discharges into the main line along the curb, someone had installed a mail box and managed to plunge a metal stake through the top of that pipe. There too, Schnadenberg noted, dirt and debris had entered the line and plugged it.

Hence the flooding. Repairs have been made on those two breaches and Schnadenberg said that he is “confident” that the greater part of the problem has been solved.

Nevertheless, a berm will still probably need to be constructed at the rear of the Ivanoviches’ yard to prevent a certain amount of drainage from the CHS baseball field. Schnadenberg has plans to contact the Duneland School Corporation soon to discuss the issue.

Bypasses and Backups

The rest of Chesterton’s stormwater problem will not be solved so easily, however.

As Utility Superintendent Steve Yagelski reported to both the Stormwater Management and Utility Service Boards, on Jan. 7-8 between 3.25 inches and 5 inches of rain fell, on top of a recent melt of some eight inches of snow.

There were two obvious consequences. First, the wastewater treatment plant bypassed a total of 487,500 gallons of sewage into the Little Calumet River between 7:30 p.m. and 12 a.m. Jan. 7. At midnight, though, the Little Cal overflowed into the plant itself. “We were treating the river,” Town Engineer Mark O’Dell said. “It was coming in and we were sending it right back.” That situation lasted around 21 hours, until the Little Cal receded.

Second, the town’s lift stations were overwhelmed, forcing the Utility to acquire the temporary use of four additional vacuum trucks in order to keep them manually pumped down. Of particular significance to the residents of the Villages of Sand Creek—where sewage backed up into some basements—the Dickinson Road lift station was simply unable for fully 24 hours to handle the water being sent to it. Three of the six vacuum trucks in the field during the storm were tasked solely to Dickinson Road, while 11 of the lift stations which feed it were periodically shut down to reduce the pressure on it.

“Despite the crew’s efforts and additional equipment, some homes unavoidably did have sanitary flow backups,” Yagelski said. “Staff did attempt to keep in contact with individual homeowners to keep them abreast of our progress during the day and night.”

As Yagelski noted, the Dickinson Road lift station is slated for a major upgrade this year, which will be the Lake Erie Land Company’s responsibility both to design and fund. As part of that upgrade, Dickinson Road’s capacity will be increased and its two 18-horse power pumps will be replaced by three 75-horse power models, so eventually backups in the Villages of Sand Creek should become a thing of the past.

The Dickinson Road lift station takes all sanitary flow from the east side of Ind. 49, and will one day take all flow as well from the Sand Creek Farms subdivision.

Upgrading the Dickinson Road lift station is all well and good, noted Larry Brandt, president of both the Stormwater Management Board and Utility Service Board. But just how in the heck is all that stormwater getting into the sanitary sewer system in the first place, particularly on the east side of Ind. 49, where that system is mostly new and separated?

Yagelski said that he’s not sure but can make some educated guesses. Some people may have their sump pumps illegally connected to sanitary sewers, he said. Possibly some sanitary sewer manholes were underwater and vast amounts of stormwater were entering the system in that way. Possibly too there is a certain amount of ground infiltration in the Indian Boundary Conservancy District, which sends its liquid wastes to the wastewater treatment plant but retains solids in septic tanks.

But Yagelski admitted that he’s only guessing at this point. In order to get a better handle on infiltration the Utility will need to acquire some additional meters.

Well, then acquire the meters, Brandt said. Do you need an extra employee to collect and read the data? If so, you’d better hire someone. “We need to be much more aggressive about finding out where the problems are.”

Springdale Allocation

How seriously is Brandt taking the infiltration issue? This seriously: at the Utility Service Board’s meeting he refused to vote in favor of a motion granting an allocation at the wastewater treatment plant to the Springdale planned unit development in Crocker, because the plans for that project do not include a pipe-to-pipe connection of sump pumps to the stormwater system. Members did vote 3-1 to grant that allocation, however, a standard one of 310 gallons per day (gpd) per residence or a total of 29,140 (gpd).

Attorney Greg Babcock, representing land owner Larry Wright and developer Don Coker, was clearly a bit miffed by Brandt’s position. For one thing, he noted that even a pipe-to-pipe connection would not prevent a homeowner from taking a hacksaw to the PVC, installing a 90-degree elbow, and illegally running the sump pump to a sanitary sewer. For another thing, Babcock did not altogether appreciate Brandt’s implication that the residents of Springdale are going to be cheaters.

But Brandt was firm. “I’m going to oppose any single person coming here for sanitary sewer unless they have a plan for preventing stormwater from getting into the sanitary sewer.”

Other Highlights

from the Flood

During the Utility Service Board’s meeting, O’Dell made a point of noting that, as regrettable as it is that Chesterton’s wastewater treatment plant was forced to bypass during the storm, it bypassed very little compared to five other unnamed plants in Northwest Indiana. One—with an emergency storage tank—bypassed 500,000 gallons; another, 14 million gallons; a third, 13 million gallons; a fourth, 77 million gallons; and one other, 123 million gallons.

For his part Schnadenberg told the Stormwater Management Board that three drainage projects completed last year—one on 10th Street and two on 20th Street—all proved their worth on Jan. 7-8. “They worked well,” he said. “We had no complaints.”

Schnadenberg did ask the Stormwater Management Board’s authority to purchase a new three-inch pump and hose, after it became apparent during the storm that the Street Department’s 20-year-old pump had reached the end of its life. Members voted 3-0 to authorize an expenditure not to exceed $3,000.

Members of the Utility Service Board were unanimous in praising crews for their fine work during the storm and in particular for the logistical skill evinced by Yagelski and O’Dell in organizing the response.

2007 in Review

The Stormwater Utility finished 2007 with a surplus of $134,969.

Organization

Members voted 3-0 to re-elect Brandt to the presidency and Thomas Kopko to the vice-presidency. They then voted 3-0 to change the date of their next meeting, from 6:15 p.m. Monday, Feb. 18, to 6:15 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 19. That Monday is a federal holiday, Presidents Day.

Posted 1/22/2008