Before Hurricane Hermine made landfall well north of St. Pete last week, officials didn't seem all that concerned about the possibility of another stormwater influx causing another sewage dump into coastal waters.
They asked residents to curb their water consumption by refraining from running the dishwasher or, you know, watering their lawns in the pouring rain.
But then the rain came, and there was a lot of it.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the city's wastewater infrastructure was so overwhelmed that the city had to release at least 20 million gallons of partially treated sewage into Tampa and Boca Ciega bays, as did other municipalities like Clearwater and Tampa, with the total known amount, Bay area-wide, nearing 30 million gallons.
This, after St. Petersburg dumped tens of millions of gallons into the bay in the wake of intense rain events in 2015.
Some sewer lines clogged, the Times notes, and manholes overflowed in some areas.
It's not exactly tourism brochure fodder, nor kind of thing a city and region whose key selling points include their lovely waterways want to have on their hands.
It's really a perfect storm, decades in the making.
For years, administrations at the local, state and national level have neglected basic infrastructure needs despite knowing, probably, that populations grow and, as they do, so does the amount of waste they produce — as well as wear and tear on roads, bridges and pipes. Combine that with rising sea levels and increasingly frequent intense storms, and here we are.
Meanwhile, an influx of downtown development in both Tampa and St. Pete is making people question what the cities will do with all that extra wastewater thousands of new residents will produce.
It's an obvious political headache for St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, who's been left holding the bag even though previous administrations, either out of ignorance or fiscal conservatism, failed to lay the groundwork for upgrading the city's wastewater infrastructure.
Kriseman will likely run for reelection in 2017, and the sewage dumps will definitely be election year fodder. If he has a challenger (c'mon, you know he will), it will likely be a Republican who has held office before — and who might've been in a position to question local or state investments in infrastructure, but didn't, or at least didn't do enough. So there's that.
This article appears in Sep 1-8, 2016.