Officials with the City of St. Petersburg say that roughly 1,500 gallons of raw sewage bubbled out of a manhole yesterday, adding to the literal billion gallons of shit already spilled into local waterways.
The spill occurred on Monday, July 8, at the 1200 block of Eden Isle Blvd. NE after “a line blockage from an unknown material” caused a manhole to shoot out 1,500 gallons of wastewater.
According to a city wastewater and discharge notification, the sewage then flowed into a nearby stormwater catch basin. The city says the blockage has been cleared and “repairs will be made.”
While 1,500 gallons of sewage may seem like a drop in the ocean, this is just the latest chapter in St. Petersburg’s long and storied battle with poop water, that actually goes back over 30 years.
But the most famous of which occurred in 2017, when the City agreed to spend $326 million in repairs after it was discovered that 200 million gallons of wastewater was dumped into local waterways between 2015 and 2016. In total, Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection estimated that at least a billion gallons of shit were spilled in that time period.
Since then, St. Petersburg continues to struggle to keep their wastewater in check. Last December, another 70,000 gallons of poop water was again spilled into Tampa Bay.
But St. Petersburg isn’t alone, just about every city in Tampa Bay struggles with keeping their poop in the sewers.
Of course, all of this doesn’t help when three nearby beaches had to close last weekend because of excessive levels of enterococcus bacteria, which comes from… you guessed it, shiiiiiiiiiit.
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This article appears in Jul 4-11, 2019.
