Waste Water Treatment
Sanitary and Storm Sewer
Water Waste Treatment Plant
400 10th Avenue Southeast
Spencer, IA 51301
(712) 262-5584
Contract Operations – Veolia
Project Manager: Duane Eternecka
Problems with your sewer lines:
Call Spencer Public Works: 712/580-7200 8:00am – 5:00pm Monday – Friday
Emergency: Call Spencer Police Department at (712) 262-2151 after hours and weekends
UTILITY LOCATION
Before you dig: Dial Iowa One Call (800) 292-8989 or 811 for utility line locations
Examples:
Garden digging
Planting trees
Building fence
Driveway
Combine Sewer Overflow Public Notification
What is a Combined Sewer Overflow or CSO?
In the City of Spencer, like many other cities in Iowa, some sewer pipes carry both wastewater (used water and sewage that goes down the drain in homes and businesses) and storm water (rain or melted snow that washes off streets and parking lots) to the City’s Wastewater Treatment Plant. When the wastewater and storm water flow together in the same pipe it is know as a Combined Sewer System. Much of the older parts of Spencer have a combined sewer system. There are four Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO’s) locations in Spencer, three empty into the north side of the Little Sioux River and the fourth into a drainageway north of Pederson Park that discharges into Muddy Creek 2.5 miles east of Spencer. A sign placed at the CSO location identifies these structures.
Why is an identification sign needed?
The City of Spencer Wastewater Treatment Plant operates under a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Permit issued by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. As part of our permit we are required to have a public notification program to inform the public what a CSO is.
Do these CSO’s discharge into the river often?
No. The CSO’s are designed to only discharge into the river during heavy rain events. The City has also developed a plan to eliminate these CSO events totally, by performing sewer seperation projects through 2028..
What other things are being done to reduce CSO events?
Over the past several years the City of Spencer has completed numerous large storm sewer projects that have separated these combined systems in different areas of the city. All new construction and developments are required to have separate wastewater and storm sewer systems as part of their design. The City continues to separate as much of these combined systems as money becomes available. Each time one of these storm sewer projects is completed it reduces the load on the combined sewer system and thus reduces the number of CSO events.
Recently, a new CSO system was constructed to capture the CSO discharges adn pump those to a 8 million gallon equalization pond. In 2013 this system catured 95% of the CSO discharges.
