Over the weekend on Saturday, July 27th an alarm went off notifying the South Tahoe Public Utility District of higher-than-normal spills at one of their sewer pump stations on Fallen Leaf Lake Road.
They sent an operator to check out the alert and a broken valve was discovered.
Shelly Thomsen, the Director of Public and Legislative Affairs for South Tahoe Public Utility District explains what they did when they got to the site.
“Because we couldn’t isolate the valves our sewer crews had to bring the vacuum trucks out to pump water out of the manhole to draw down water levels, then our crews did a confined space entry to be able to repair the valve,” she said.
The valve was repaired within hours, and the site was cleaned with granulated chlorine.
Sunday morning they took six water quality samples. The first set of samples that were tested showed higher than normal levels or bacteria. Because of this they put up waring signs along the beach.
On Tuesday, July 30th they got back the samples taken on Monday and the bacteria levels were back to baseline. Since then, warning signs have been removed.
“The bacteria levels that were detected are the same that were baseline and the same that’s everywhere in the lake and it is safe to swim in,” said Thomsen.
She says the bacteria samples take 24 hours to process which is why Monday's test samples didn't come back until Tuesday afternoon.
