I took a week to report this. What would cause a pump to fail?

******************************************************************** www.charlotte.com/observer/local/pub/metbriefs1119.htm

Pump fails; sewage mostly contained An estimated 1.6 million gallons of partially treated sewage spilled at Charlotte's Irwin Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, Charlotte Mecklenburg Utilities says. Most of the spill soaked into the ground at the plant or was pumped back into the treatment system, an official said. The official said no more than 10,000 gallons - and possibly none at all - reached the creek. Utilities said no fish kills resulted.

The spill occurred Monday when a pump failed.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), November 19, 1999

Answers

At lot of things can cause a pump to fail... seized bearings, a short in the wiring, old age, electrical surge, improper maintenance, a leak in the housing, failed switch/relay, dirt or other foreign objects in the line, etc. etc etc

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), November 19, 1999.

Pump failure does not cause leakages. Pump stops. No leakage there. possibly the tank it was intended to releave was over burdened and the tank overflowed. A lot of sewerage treatment is done in open tanks/pools. The question is why didn't their scada system tell them they had a pump failure/overflow problem before 1.6 million gallons spilled out??? I'm not saying this was even a software issue. Just another failure of a working system unless they had thrown the switch on new software downloads and this resulted similarly to the Washington gasoline spill.

-- ..- (dit@dot.dash), November 19, 1999.