Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District General Manager Mike Luers says the facility in Silver Creek started seeing elevated ammonia levels the second week of October.
Ammonia is a kind of nitrogen commonly found in fertilizers and cleaners.
The wastewater district says it doesn’t know where the ammonia in the Silver Creek facility is coming from.
The Silver Creek Water Reclamation Facility draws dirty water from kitchens and bathrooms in the Park City area. It cleans the water and puts it into the Weber Basin watershed, where it becomes a drinking water source for communities north of the Snyderville Basin.
Luers said early adjustments in water treatment didn’t reduce the ammonia.
“We made some more adjustments, and we saw basically no change in what was going on within the treatment facility,” he told KPCW. “Our levels of ammonia that we were discharging kept creeping up to the point where we finally said, ‘Something's really not right here.’”
Elevated nitrogen can result in algal blooms and plant overgrowth, which can harm aquatic animals. But wastewater officials say there’s not a public health risk right now.
“Due to a number of factors, including the colder weather and the amount of nitrogen being released, the district does not anticipate that the increase in nitrogen or the pollutant will result in any risk to the public,” a Tuesday press release states.
The district expects to exceed the amount of nitrogen it’s permitted to release and says it’s working with the Utah Division of Water Quality “to resolve any issues.”
Luers said whatever polluted the wastewater system reduced the efficacy of bacteria at the Silver Creek facility about 50%. It relies on bacteria to neutralize nitrogen, including ammonia, so the district is trucking in thousands more gallons of the microbes.
In the meantime, water reclamation officials are sampling Park City-area water to determine the source of contamination.
“This may be a situation where someone used some type of, say, disinfectant or sanitizer that’s more or less a commercial-grade chemical,” Luers said. “And they wanted to get rid of it, and they dumped it down the drain not thinking anything of it, and it basically shut down a portion of our treatment facility.”
He estimates it will take weeks for the Silver Creek facility to recover. The district’s other facility in Jeremy Ranch is not affected.
Wastewater officials ask anyone with information about chemical spills or industrial products disposed in the sewer to contact Luers.
“We're not here to persecute anybody or or penalize anyone,” he said. “We just really would like to know what happened and how we can avoid it in the future.”
