Floodwaters draw new warnings about pollutants

Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, MO.

Veronica Tate knew from the stench that sewage was among the 8 feet of water that swamped the basement of her ranch-style home after the nearby Meramec River overflowed. The larger concern for residents of her suburban St. Louis neighborhood is the unknown of what else the noxious blend might have contained.

“It came up through the sewers, I guess,” Tate, a customer service representative for an insurance company, said of last week’s flooding. “When you get down there and look at it, there’s a smell. There’s an odor.”

Wastewater was a certainty in her Arnold neighborhood, given that two nearby treatment plants failed when the Meramec flooded in record fashion after days of unrelenting rain. The inundation has spewed tens of millions of gallons of untreated human waste, according to the sewer district’s website, on a path toward the Mississippi River and an unavoidable southward trek to the Gulf of Mexico. Those plants remained offline Tuesday.

But the floodwaters also could include such things as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides washed away from farmland, not to mention livestock waste, industrial chemicals, dead animals, fuel from convenience stores and toxins from railroad tracks. Even pollutants from things as small as the gas can in a flooded garage.

Floodwaters may contain more than 100 types of disease-causing bacteria, according to a 2012 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.