Warsaw's sewage treatment plant is in the final phase of a sediment clean-up, public works superintendent Lacy Francis said Friday afternoon.

Francis said the "fines" - tiny particles of sediment that remain after wastewater is heated and filtered - overflowed the sludge tanks into the creek adjacent to the treatment plant earlier this week.

"The fines usually go into the tanks, then we take our tanker trucks and fill them up and land-apply it," Francis said, on selected farm fields.

This year, however, some of the landowners in the program decided to withdraw their acreage from the land-application process, he said. The treatment plant applied in March to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management for permission to apply the fines on new fields, Francis said, and the permits were received this week.

"Basically, it spilled because the tank levels got too high," Francis said. "We're rectifying the problem right now."

Because the particles have been through the heating and filtering process, he said, they're not like raw waste. "But we can't be letting anything get through but liquids," he said.

Three people from IDEM have been in Warsaw this week, Francis said. "The lab forewarned us, we started checking and called IDEM. They're trying to help us resolve the problem."

The IDEM emergency specialists, he said, are "monitoring what we do and trying to give us some ideas."

Francis said city personnel are taking the appropriate steps to clean up the situation, and he expects the problem to be resolved "in a couple of days." [[In-content Ad]]