Cracked pipe causes 4M gallons of raw sewage to flow into Pinellas neighborhood
Get personalized newsletters for any city in the world with Headline, sign up here.
Last month’s spill was the third to occur near the intersection of 53rd Avenue North and 110th Street North since 2021. Officials say improvements are on the way. Outside Barry Medlock’s home on 53rd Avenue North in unincorporated Pinellas County, a faint odor of sewage lingered. His property was “ground zero” for a 4½ million gallon spill of raw wastewater that flooded the street and gushed into his garage two weeks ago. But it didn’t surprise him.
It’s the third time the pipe running through Medlock’s neighborhood to a nearby treatment facility has burst in recent years. The first spill happened in 2021. One year later, another failure unleashed about 300,000 gallons of untreated wastewater. Medlock was getting the Sunday newspaper during that spill when he came home to see sewage bubbling up. This time, he was at work when his next-door neighbor called.
”It’s back,” they told him. Medlock arrived home and found sewage flooding his backyard. It crept downhill onto the properties of at least two of his neighbors, he said. County crews didn’t stop the flow for another five hours, Medlock recalled. According to Pinellas County, crews responded to the 53rd Avenue North neighborhood, near 110th Street North, around 7:30 a.
m. on Aug. 28. The spill was caused by a crack in an aging 24-inch sewer line. Over the next few days, more than 4,400,000 gallons of sewage spilled, enough to fill roughly six Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Nory Hancock, the county’s deputy director of utilities, said the spill was under control by about 1 p. m. on Aug. 28. The county used vacuum trucks to collect about 874,000 gallons of wastewater, and overflows over the next few days were directed to a stormwater ditch using sandbags, Hancock said.
About five or six homes were affected by the spill, Hancock said. Medlock’s home was the only one to have sewage reach the garage. The other homes had sewage that crept up as far as their lawns, Hancock said. Wastewater did reach surrounding coastal waterways, the county said.