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Northport Pump Station

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The city of Northport’s lift station malfunctioned on Wednesday, September 14th, dumping between 10,000 and 100,000 gallons of raw sewage into the Black Warrior River. The malfunction happened at the pump station on Fifth Street and Lurleen Wallace Boulevard, just over the Hugh Thomas Bridge where downtown Northport connects to Tuscaloosa. The pump station services around 5,000 customers in the Northport area. Citizens in Northport are outraged. On the city’s Facebook page Derek Nicholas Snow said, “Appears our dated sewer system needs to move to highest priority. Our citizens will not tolerate these occurrences any longer, nor can growth occur if the situation is not addressed immediately. Please take action City of Northport.” The dumping …show more content…

“We contracted with a contractor to bring in two diesel driven bypass pumps that have floats to start them automatically if the water gets to a certain depth the pumps will come on and run and this will guarantee that there is not another SSO (Sanitary Sewer Overflow).” James McKinney, assistant utilities director said. The utility department manned the station 24 hours a day for the first two days after the incident, making sure that nothing happened while they were still handling the cleanup of the current spill. Furthermore, over the weekend they conducted extensive checks on the station in an effort to be overly cautious. McKinney said. “We are making every effort to keep this from happening, but it is a mechanical system and just like any mechanical system, there are possibilities of things going wrong,” McKinney said. As of Tuesday the samples still did not yield good results for all areas of sampled river. Signs will continue to be posted in the area, discouraging patrons from recreating on the river, until at least the next set of samples is run, which the city is expecting to have the results on

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