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Untreated Sewage Dumped Into Quincy Bay

About 25 million gallons of untreated sewage emptied into Quincy Bay late Saturday after a transformer accident in South Boston triggered a massive power outage at the Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant.

The plant was operating at full capacity to handle the heavy rainfall throughout the region when it lost its power shortly after 5 p.m. The plant’s emergency backup power was quickly activated, but the station took several hours to resume peak operations.

The station had been treating 1.2 billion gallons of wastewater daily, three times its usual rate, for the past several days.

In the meantime, operators were forced to drain polluted water from communities south of Boston into the bay, to avoid overflowing local systems, streets, and cellars. Smaller amounts of sewage and storm water were also emptied into the Charles River and parts of Boston Harbor from several Boston-area overflow stations, though some was treated with chlorine, said Frederick Laskey, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which runs the Deer Island plant.

MWRA officials conducted water tests yesterday off Nut Island in Quincy, where the bulk of the wastewater was released. Laskey said he expected elevated bacteria levels but predicted they would soon return to normal. The combined water and sewage consisted almost entirely of runoff from the rain, he said.

”It’s not clean, but it’s mostly rain,” he said.

Laskey said the combination of an abrupt power loss and the intense rain that inundated the region left operators no choice but to release the wastewater, which typically goes through several phases of treatment before being released into Quincy Bay.

”If we hadn’t, we would have flooded stations and put raw sewage into cellars and streets,” Laskey said. ”In an emergency situation, we have to bypass the treatment.”

The power outage occurred just after 5 p.m. Saturday, when a worker under contract with NStar was shocked while cleaning equipment at a South Boston transformer station near K and First streets.

Nicholas Catano, an employee of Atlantic Power Cleaning Corp. in Woburn, remained in critical condition yesterday at Massachusetts General Hospital. A second worker suffered burns to the face, and a third suffered minor injuries. The accident is being investigated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

”It created a huge electrical fault,” said NStar spokesman Walter Salvi. The transformer was immediately shut down because of ”human contact,” he said.

Salvi said the South Boston power station exclusively serves Deer Island through underwater power cables. Laskey said the MWRA and NStar were discussing the circumstances of the accident.

While the rain subsided yesterday, heavy winds caused thousands of outages across New England. More than 15,000 National Grid customers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire were without power yesterday afternoon. Between 8,000 and 10,000 homes in metropolitan Boston had lost power, mainly because of downed power lines, NStar reported, though many of those were back on line last night.

The MWRA, which notified state and federal environmental officials yesterday about the overflow, may face fines for the runoff. But Laskey defended the agency’s handling of the situation, saying the emergency generators worked as planned. Pumps were running, though at reduced capacity, within 90 minutes of the outage, he said.

”Given the situation, we had no other alternative,” he said. ”And we did it in a fashion that minimized the environmental damage.” Resuming peak operations any faster, Laskey said, would have damaged the plant. The plant resumed normal capacity between 8 and 9 p.m., Laskey said.

Bruce Berman of Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, an environmental group, said the MWRA should ”reexamine its protocol” in light of the power outage to guard against untreated sewage polluting area waters.

”This isn’t surprising,” he said. ”It’s happened before, and it will happen again.”

Berman said the current strong winds would likely disperse the pollution in the ocean quickly and did not expect any significant effect on aquatic life.

”In the scheme of things it’s fairly minimal, but we should do better,” Berman said.

Ria Convery, an MWRA spokeswoman, said the power outage would have had minimal effects had it not been for the large amount of rain.

The plant’s emergency overflow plan calls for diverting wastewater from the Nut Island facility, which in 1998 began treating wastewater from the southern suburbs, into Quincy harbor, rather than a tunnel to Deer Island. Nut Island treats about 400 million gallons a day.

The plant was able to store sewage north of the city in temporary holding tanks until the plant was running at full capacity. Deer Island serves 43 communities in Greater Boston.

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