News

A third round of water sampling points to Turkey Creek’s recovery from a massive sewage spill in Raleigh.

“Of the E. coli site testing (of Turkey and Crabtree creeks), no sites failed,” water-quality intern Caroline DeGroodt said about the latest round of testing.

Caroline and fellow intern Corey Reaves were charged with weekly follow-up sampling after the first round of samples — taken two days after the spill — showed “off the chart” levels of bacteria near the spill site and half a mile downstream.

The spill occurred on May 13, was reported to North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality on May 14, but the source of the spill was a failed sewage line built to circumvent construction of the expansion of Raleigh-Durham Airport. On instructions from the City of Raleigh, the contractor pumped more than 1 million gallons of raw sewage into trucks to be disposed of in a sewer manhole. However, the crew mistook a stormwater manhole for a sewer manhole and 223,000 gallons of sewage flowed directly into Turkey Creek, just south of Glenwood Avenue.

Raleigh Water crews flushed out the creek by hose in the days afterward. A second round of sampling the following week showed lower levels of bacteria, though they still exceeded state a federal water-quality standards.

The City of Raleigh issued a notice of violation to the responsible contractor and weighing a fine to cover the cost of the cleanup.

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