Politics & Government

City's Sewer/Water on Back-up Generators

City workers, plus CL&P, are working to restore power to more than 30,000 city residents, but no one is making any promises.

Danbury's Sewer Treatment Plant has been running on a back-up generator since 6 p.m. Sunday and the Marjerie Reservoir is also running on a generator, said Public Works Director Antonio Iadarolla.

"We get a little nervous on standby power," Iadarolla said.

He said anything can break on a generator, a motor, a line cloggs or the radiator breaks. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton and Iadarolla said they want to restore full power to the plant and reservoir as soon as possible.

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"We've demanded CL&P be here. We heard they'd be here at 8. Then 8:30. Then 9. then 9:30. I was keeping a crew on standby to help them, and finally, I sent them out," Iadarolla said. CL&P had three crews in Danbury as of about 3 p.m., Boughton said. Now workers from Public Works are leading CL&P crews to the downed wires and helping clear the trees involved.

Iadarolla, who oversees all the public works divisions, borrowed skilled workers from forestry, highway, parks and the water department to clear city streets, said Mark Miller, forrestry superintendent. Those workers cleared roads all weekend, until all 60 trees that fell onto roads had been cut and pushed aside, at least for one lane of traffic. The final clean up will take days. Those first 60 were the trees blocking roads that didn't take down wires on their way to the ground.

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Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said the clearing has to take place in stages. First clear one lane. Then clear both lanes, but only push the trees to the side. "With a loader, we can cut a 30-inch tree and push it to the side. We're out of there in two minutes," Iadarolla said. The last step in that process is removing the dead trees entirely.

Workers came in on Saturday and Sunday, including department heads, who are not paid overtime, and Iadarolla said his people worked like a professional sports team to support each other. "I can't say enough about them," Iadarolla said.

On the electricity side, 54 trees have been reported on wires, or over wires or leaning on wires around the city. That led to power outages for 11,206 customers or 31 pecent of Danbury, according to CL&P's outage map.

The consequences of a generator failure at the sewer treatment plant are extremely bad for the environment. The plant treats about 9 million gallons of wastewater daily. If the backup generator fails at the sewer treatment plant, raw sewage will flow out of the plant. Putting that plant back online is a big priority, Iadarolla said.

"If you can't process it, it's gravity fed, and it's going right out, and if it's going right out, that's a bad thing," Iadarolla said.

Boughton said CL&P put a worker in City Hall to help organize the restoration of power, but he said so far, he's still hearing three or four days.

"We're trying to help in every way we can," Boughton said, including by putting city workers next to CL&P workers to remove trees as fast as the CL&P workers say they're safe to touch.


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