By KEVIN NEVERS

At 5:30 p.m. on Monday the Chesterton wastewater treatment plant finally stopped bypassing partially treated sewage into the Little Calumet River, ending a combined sewer overflow (CS)) which had begun at 3:30 a.m. Saturday.

So Utility Superintendent Steve Yagelski told the Utility Service Board at its meeting Monday night.

Meanwhile, though, the Tanglewood II lift station—like many of the residents in that subdivision—remained completely submerged, staff was trying to get to the bottom of approximately 50 reports of backups throughout the town, and crews were still working around the clock at a variety of locations.

Yagelski gave the Service Board this rundown:

•The Tanglewood II lift station—a “pop-up” model—did not pop up when it was supposed to. “It’s dead at the moment,” Yagelski said. “It’s not pumping at all. We’re operating around the clock with the Vactor truck.” Yagelski expressed some hope that the lift station might be hot-wired into operation, but the long and the short of it is that the pop-design proved dangerously inadequate and that lift station will have to be pulled permanently from the ground. Yagelski noted that six to eight homes in the subdivision have experienced backups and that some residents have as much as two feet of water in their basements. “Some people can’t get out of their homes at all,” he said.

•Elsewhere, Yagelski said, the Dickinson Road lift station is being continuously tended, the lift station at 19th Street and West Morgan Ave. is at high alert, and the Crocker area received a lot of water. Two sinkholes formed when customers’ laterals collapsed, one in an alley in the 200 block of South Ninth Street, the other in an alley in the 200 block of South 12th Street.

•The Utility has received a total of around 50 reports of backups throughout the town, and by no means all of them from areas where lift stations lost some degree of functionality. Town Engineer Mark O’Dell advised members that, in many of the cases, it’s not entirely clear what sort of backup occurred: sanitary backflow, ground-water seepage, or actual stormwater flooding. “With 12 inches of rain,” Member Scot McCord observed, “that much water’s got to go somewhere.”

•Over the course of 72 hours, Yagelski added, the wastewater treatment plant pumped at the extraordinary average rate of 10 million gallons per day. When, on Sunday, the overflowing Little Calumet River began raising the level of a nearby wetland and threatening the plant itself with inundation, a sandbag dam was built with the help of Chesterton firefighters and extra workers provided by R.V. Sutton Inc.

“Chesterton kind of weathered it pretty good,” President Larry Brandt said, compared to some of the other communities in Northwest Indiana. “We had our share but it seems to me it could have been a whole lot worse, if we didn’t have such dedicated town employees. . . . We’re very fortunate to have a company like R.V. Sutton that at the drop of a hat will respond to an emergency, when other companies won’t.”

“It’s been said before, the staff did a very good job,” Member John Schnadenberg agreed.

“You could see guys were all over town at all hours, and you can’t appreciate it enough,” Member Jim Raffin said.

Member Andy Michel voiced his gratitude as well to R.V. Sutton for supplying pinch-hitters. “I guess it’s a town attitude,” he said, “and its nice to live in a town with that attitude.”

For his part Member Scot McCord had a good word to say about all Chesterton residents. “The citizens have to be commended too,” he said. “I saw a lot of citizens helping other citizens. If somebody was struck, they got out and helped instead of driving by.”

McCord also took a moment to express the Service Board’s sympathies to the Thanos family, on the deaths of John Thanos, 74, and his son Mark Thanos, 48, who drowned tragically and heroically on Sunday while trying to save a boy who had been swept away in a drainage ditch in Westchester South. “Those were two very brave men,” he said.

August in Review

In August Chesterton used 47.30 percent of its 3,794,000 gallon per day (gpd) allotment of the wastewater treatment plant; Porter, 60.66 percent of its 767,000 gpd allotment; the Indian Boundary Conservancy District, 62.68 percent of its 81,000 gpd allotment; and the plant as a whole, 49.93 percent of its capacity. Last month 3.595 million gallons were bypassed. In August the Utility ran a deficit of $169,777 and in the year-to-date is running a deficit of $26,581.

2009 Budget

By consensus members agreed to hold a special meeting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 23, at the plant to discuss the 2009 budget.

Surplus

Members voted 5-0 to declare a number of items surplus in advance of the town auction on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at the Street Department at 609 Grant Ave.: viewing at 6:30 p.m., auction at 7 p.m.

The list includes shelving, a selection of computer monitors, a Motorola base radio, a microwave, 16 fabric wall panels, and various other office furnishing.

Posted 9/16/2008