Repairs end sewage leak into wash

Wednesday, Oct. 28, 1998 | 11:48 a.m.

Workers repaired a break in a pipe Tuesday and stopped a flow of raw sewage that had been pouring into Duck Creek for three days.

A building contractor sliced through the line Saturday, but the Clark County Sanitation District was not notified until Tuesday, spokesman Marty Flynn said.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection will investigate the spill, since Duck Creek leads to the Las Vegas Wash and Lake Mead, Southern Nevada's major source of drinking water.

The line was repaired about noon Tuesday, said Granite Construction Co. project manager Robert Nelson.

The company is building a bridge across Duck Creek at Eastern Avenue and Pebble Road.

"It's been repaired," Nelson said Tuesday, noting that the heavy equipment scraped the top off the pipeline.

Nelson said the company patched the 10-inch line, because parts were unavailable until late Monday. It took an hour to repair the line on Tuesday.

"It wasn't leaking profusely," Nelson said. "We did report it to the Sanitation District on Saturday."

Flynn said, "That's news to us."

After a preliminary check of telephone records at the district, Flynn said no emergency notifications had been received over the weekend. "We will continue an internal investigation," he said.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection had not been notified of the spill until Tuesday at either its Las Vegas or Carson City office, representatives said at each end of the state. For discharging into the wash, the state could fine a violator up to $25,000 a day.

This was not the first sewage spill in Duck Creek this year. A county sewer line broken during a Sept. 11 storm poured up to 1,200 gallons per minute of raw sewage into the creek.

Sanitation district crews discovered that leak about a week after the storm. The district had to pump out raw sewage from the broken line to a separate manhole leading the the county's treatment plant. That prevented the contaminated water from entering the wash.