Whenever a storm dumps heavy rain on Joel Easley’s neighborhood, sewage overflows into his backyard.
Waste water, feces and toilet paper spout from a manhole, cascading through a fence and then reaching a river, polluting public waters.
“We don’t let our kids in the backyard,” said Easley, who moved into the Oakhurst neighborhood last summer. “It’s gross.”
The county and environmental agencies are investigating the extent of the county's infractions, which breached the terms of a 2010 federal court agreement that mandated upgrades to the county's aging water and sewer system, part of $1.35 billion in improvements being paid for through customers' water bills.
DeKalb County acknowledged underreporting sewage spills at Easley’s house and potentially many more residences, violating federal and state environmental regulations.
At Easley's house alone, the county has responded to seven sewer spills in the last two years, according to records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request. Only three of those spills were noted in required reports to environmental authorities.
The county could face fines from the Georgia Environmental Protection Division and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at the conclusion of the investigation.
“The county has underreported spills,” said Jac Capp, chief of the EPD Watershed Protection Branch. “If they met the definition of a spill, they should have been reported as such.”
DeKalb’s government reported the problems to environmental agencies, fired a watershed manager and hired a company to conduct an investigation into the extent of the issue.
The county plans to discuss the findings of the investigation with environmental regulators by the end of July, said spokesman Burke Brennan. DeKalb’s government also changed its sewage spill reporting practices to ensure future compliance with reporting rules.
Sewage spills have decreased since 2012, when the county reported 141 spills. Last year, the county listed 116 spills. Those numbers are now in question until the investigation is concluded.
But DeKalb needs to do better than reporting spills — it needs to significantly reduce them, said Jackie Echols of the South River Watershed Alliance.
“As it stands, there is no limit on the number of spills that can occur as long as those spills are reported,” Echols said. “This approach does not protect the public and the environment.”
About a mile and a half from Easley’s property, several residents also have had repeated difficulties with sewage overflows.
Raw sewage has repeatedly discharged tampons, toilet paper and fecal matter onto sidewalks, roads and yards along Green Street in Decatur, wrote environmental attorney Hutton Brown in a letter to regulators. DeKalb reported only half of 12 sewage overflows in the area from January 2013 to December 2015, according to his letter.
Brown said he focused on a community where there were clear problems, and he suspects sewage spills are being underreported throughout the county.
“It certainly seems systemic,” said Brown, an attorney for GreenLaw. “Our ultimate goal is for these overflows to stop happening. The county has structural problems with its sewer system.”
Untreated sewage in water can cause a variety of gastrointestinal illnesses, he said.
The fired DeKalb manager, Charles Lambert, said he was unfairly terminated, and county field crews accurately reported all sewage spills as required.
“If they did not actually see the spill, they could not make a false statement that they did,” said Lambert, the former assistant director for operations in the DeKalb Department of Watershed Management. “They did record the information of each call, and if sewage was present, they did clean up the area.”
But that explanation isn’t adequate for Easley, who said there was ample evidence of spills, such as debris, silt and soaked lawns.
“It seems like there’s a lot of incompetence involved or just hoping it would go away,” he said. “It’s really just a matter of time — with a few more rainstorms it will happen again.”
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