State agency orders Baxter Springs to resolve problems at sewage lagoon w/ KDHE administrative order and Mayor's letter

By Roger McKinney

rmckinney@joplinglobe.com

BAXTER SPRINGS, Kan. — The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has ordered the city of Baxter Springs to stop polluting Spring River.

The city has hired an environmental engineer to study the problem, said Mayor Huey York.

The sewage lagoon east of Spring River on the eastern edge of town has been the source of complaints about odors for several years.

The administrative order from the KDHE tells the city to find solutions to problems with its lagoon that are causing partially untreated sewage to be discharged into Spring River. An odor problem is another byproduct of the situation.

The order notes that the lagoon exceeded biochemical oxygen demand limits on May 17, 2006; July 19, 2006; Oct. 25, 2006; Dec. 20, 2006; Jan. 25, 2007; and April 25, 2007.

“The city of Baxter Springs has violated terms and conditions of the permit by failing to comply with biochemical oxygen demand limitations in the permit, thereby continuing to discharge partially treated wastewater containing concentrations of pollutants into waters of the state as is causing or likely will cause such waters to be harmful, detrimental or injurious to the aquatic life of the state,” reads the KDHE order.

“The problem is the governing body’s No. 1 priority,” York said Thursday in an interview at City Hall. “It’s going to take time to make certain that what we do is a cure and not a Band-Aid like what we’ve done in the past.”

Even so, York downplayed the pollution aspect of the order and referred to the situation only as an odor problem.

York said the city hired an engineer to study the problem in May, before the KDHE issued its order earlier this month. The engineering study is one requirement of the order.

The KDHE had received complaints from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality about the water flowing into Spring River from the sewage lagoon, the order notes. In a letter to the Oklahoma agency, the KDHE said the lagoon had experienced a number of “operational upsets” that apparently were caused by a local food processor.

The order gives the city three options:

n Building a mechanical sewage-treatment plant.

n Adding a pretreatment system at the sewage lagoon.