FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – Complaints about bad-smelling water coming up in one Pee Dee neighborhood exposed an expensive problem.
A viewer video first alerted us here at News13 of the issue. The video shows a sewer overflowing off Stratton Drive in West Florence near Lake Oakdale.
“This is raw sewage coming up out of the ground,” claimed the video’s narrator. “If you look, it’s going all the way down into the swamp.”
Officials said the pipe in question collapsed just west of I-95 and caused the mess seen in the video.
“We have a 12 inch gravel sewer line that’s collapsed due to hydrogen sulfite gas causing deterioration,” explained Michael Hemingway, Florence Public Works Director.
Hemingway said when water is moved through the city, the oxygen left behind can eat away at pipes and cause collapses–but that’s only part of the problem.
“We had a contractor come out to start work, but then realized the work was bigger than just a simple point repair,” Hemingway said.
Florence officials said the city has done what it can to minimize the problem in West Florence while they await a bigger fix.
“We are now meeting with our consultant engineers to come up with a game plan to install a new parallel pipe and get approval from the DOT to do that repair right away,” Hemingway said.
The larger overflow from just a few days ago is now a slower trickle, but the smell and the bugs are still an issue in the nearby neighborhood. Hemingway, though, said there is no health risk to anyone who lives in the area.
“We do biological testing upstream and downstream of the location that we’ve been recording,” said Hemingway
Hemingway couldn’t give an exact date that repairs would be complete, but said the process of finding help has begun.
