DELPHOS — A malfunction at a Delphos lift station resulted in what the Ohio Department of Natural Resources described as a “significant” fish kill in the Auglaize River.
According to Delphos Safety Service Director Shane Coleman, the city was first alerted late Sunday morning to the malfunction, which caused raw sewage to flow directly into the waterway.
“We had a malfunction at the Seventh Street lift station,” he said. “The pump at the station shut down, and our alarm system failed to send a notification to our operators. This created an overflow that went into the Flat Fort Creek.”
ODNR officials confirmed the overflow caused the oxygen to be depleted in the water from the lift station up to the vicinity of Fort Jennings before dispersing to safe levels for fish.
“We don’t have numbers yet, but it seems like a significant fish kill,” ODNR District 2 Law Supervisor Paul Kurfis said. “They’re just out counting fish now.”
Coleman emphasized the lift station has now been repaired, and the faulty alarm issue has been addressed, although he was unsure at the time of his interview exactly what led to the system not alerting operators about the inoperative pump.
“We had people come in immediately to get the pump station back up and running,” he said. “We’ve also fixed our alarm system and the issue has been corrected.”
The city is now working to mitigate the effects of the overflow as much as possible.
“I want to stress that as soon as we were notified by ODNR, we did respond,” Coleman said. “An emergency response team from the [Ohio Environmental Protection Agency] responded as well, and we were working hand in hand with them all day [Sunday] to identify and correct the problem, and we’re undertaking some of their suggestions to continue to deal with the problem. We’ve been in the river since [Sunday] doing some aeration in the water. It’s been a 24-hour process and it will continue. We’ll be taking ongoing readings and that will continue all the way through tonight and we’ll make the decision [Tuesday] as to what to do next.”
Wapakoneta resident Rick Hammond said he often visits that part of the Auglaize River with his family to go fishing, and after seeing the number of dead fish in the river this past weekend, which he estimated to be in the thousands, he believes it will be years before the river is back to where it was before the malfunction.
“I’ve talked with some residents in the area, and they’ve told me this is the worst they’ve seen the river since the 1970s,” he said. “It was one of the best areas around for fishing.”
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