SARASOTA, Fla. — More than 6 million gallons of untreated sewage and nearly 11.5 million gallons of partially treated wastewater were discharged into Sarasota Bay after the city's wastewater treatment plant was overwhelmed by historic rainfall as Hurricane Debby impacted the area.
This number comes from a pollution notice to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. According to city leaders, the National Weather Service reported that 11.65 inches of rain fell in Sarasota within 24 hours.
Because of this inundation of rainwater, the city's Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant became "severely impacted by excessive flow" and saw up to four times its usual daily rate. The city explained that the plant can handle about 10.2 million gallons of wastewater daily.
However, the highest flow seen during those 24 hours during Debby's torrential downpours was 44.3 million gallons.
It couldn't keep up and as a result, "the flow coming to the plant was so high and unrelenting the plant began to spill from the headworks structure," starting around 4 a.m. on Aug. 5.
While staff worked to contain the spill, the sheer volume of the mixture of rainwater and raw sewage made it impossible to keep it from entering the stormwater collection system. That system ultimately discharges into the city's waterways, including Sarasota Bay.
By 6 p.m. on Aug. 6, staff were able to stop the headworks overflow. However, there were more overflows that the staff had to fight to contain; staff found around 9 a.m. on Aug. 7 that two of its clarifiers were overflowing because of a clog. Through various methods to bypass the obstruction, the overflows were stopped just before midnight on Aug. 8.
In a statement, city leaders said Hurricane Debby "delivered an extraordinary set of circumstances" that led to the significant overflow. Leaders asserted wastewater spills are typically rare after the city in 2018 implemented a $300 million master plan to overhaul aging utility systems.
