Pinellas County neighborhood pipe ruptures, causing sewage leak

Pinellas neighborhood dealing with giant sewage leak

FOX 13's Kailey Tracy reports.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Neighbors woke up to a stinky situation, to say the least, in an unincorporated part of Pinellas County on Wednesday.

A concrete pipe 24 inches wide leaked raw sewage for nearly the entire day near 53rd Avenue North and 113th Street. County officials said utility crews responded to reports of the rupture around 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Before crews could figure out the cause of the rupture, they had to pump out more than 102,000 gallons of raw sewage.

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"The wastewater has to be diverted or removed so that they can focus on the area of concern and drill a hole into the concrete and determine what caused the rupture," Barbra Hernandez, a spokesperson for Pinellas County, said.

The 50-year-old pipe is the main sewer pipe for the neighborhood. Hernandez said there aren’t any impacts right now to neighbors’ plumbing and the water is safe to drink. She said they don’t anticipate any environmental hazards beyond the spill that’s being contained and cleaned up.

Neighbors, though, said it’s not the first time this has happened. They said sewage has ended up in their yards and some garages at least twice before just over the past few years.

"We all take bets like, ‘okay, when is it going to happen again and who is it going to affect,’ and now it’s affecting my house,’" said Barry Madlock, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 60 years. "To me, they’re putting a Band-Aid on it. It’s like, ‘okay, it’s fixed, but for how long.'"

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"It's an old pipe," Francesca Piccion, who also lives on the street, said. "These are going to be issues that occur, so if you just keep putting Band-Aids on it, you know, you're just prolonging, kicking the can down the road to addressing the real problem that the whole thing should be repaired."

Piccion said she has lived in the neighborhood since 2020, and this is the third time it has happened.

"It's a similar scenario where we just kind of wake up and there's, you know, a river flowing down towards the houses," she said. "I assume as they repair it, it just finds another place to fail, and it's just going to be an ongoing problem until they replace the entire pipe."

Hernandez said it’s not uncommon for aging pipes to have issues. She said, depending on the pipe material, they can last 50 to 100 years. Life cycle analysis is conducted to prioritize replacement, she said. According to Hernandez, because of this pipe’s age, it was already on their radar.

"Because this is an area of concern, our utilities department has been focusing on putting together a capital improvement project, which will basically replace the entire pipe along the road. It's about three quarters of a mile. So, it is a major project," Hernandez said.

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They hope to start work on that project later this year, and it will take several months to complete. Residents, though, said with the stench from this latest rupture still in the air, they wish something was done sooner.

"It seeps into our yards, and it has gone through some of the front yards to the backyards. The way that our neighborhood flows, I mean, it moves rapidly, and so it gets seeped into the ground. We have pets. We have kids that play outside, and we're standing here, and we can smell it," Piccion said. "The way that our neighborhood lays out, I mean, everything just flows down into our home. So, it's scary and unfortunate."

County officials said once crews find the root cause of Wednesday’s rupture, repairs could take anywhere from five days to two weeks.

The county said five to six properties have been impacted, and they’ve talked to those residents. They also put door hangars at each home on this street to let neighbors know what’s going on.

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