Drivers say Killingly wastewater spill left their cars with terrible stench

Killingly — Residents here and in neighboring Brooklyn said their cars still smelled Monday after driving through a wastewater spill that extended about a half-mile from the town's sewage treatment plant to the Interstate 395 southbound on-ramp at Exit 37 on Saturday. After the cleanup, Killingly officials pointed fingers at their hauling company as distraught locals demanded more restitution for their reeking vehicles than the town's offer of a free carwash. Town Manager Mary Calorio said foul-smelling water mixed with some "sterilized solid(s)" sloshed out of a trailer during two separate hauls of treated sewage that left the facility sometime before and after 1:30 a.m. Saturday. According to state police, the "fluid trail" ran from the treatment plant on Wauregan Road to Route 12, Route 6 and onto the I-395 on-ramp. Moriah Marquis, a Brooklyn resident, said a hazmat company told her it would cost $2,000 to rid her car of the noxious-smelling sludge that covered her grill, wheel wells and undercarriage after she drove through the spill site around 1:30 a.m. Marquis said she did not know what was happening when she encountered a puddle on the road, which she described as sizeable enough to cause her to temporarily lose control of her car as she slid through the water. When Marquis got home minutes later, she texted her mother. "Something reeks so bad in our yard," she wrote. "It smells literally like a corpse." When Marquis woke later that morning and got back into her car to drive to dance class, she said she finally realized where the smell was coming from. Marquis described "literally, gagging and throwing up" as she inspected the car with her mother. After taking her car through a car wash and scrubbing it herself, Marquis said "It still reeks of human feces." Any time she turns on the heat, Marquis said, the stench intensifies. "I don't have $2,000," Marquis said. "I saved up my own money at 19 years old to buy this car and I have two car payments left on it. I'm just beside myself." Calorio said drivers who potentially drove through the spill site should go through a car wash and save their receipt so the town can reimburse the costs. She said the spill involved sterilized, "end-stage" material that is "no different than fertilizers that you buy at the garden store" and poses no biological hazard. "She needs to come and smell my car and tell me that's sterile," Marquis said. "That is not sterile." Marquis' mother, Michelle Marquis, said the town needs to "take ownership and responsibility for the cost of what it's going to take to sanitize these cars, so we can have our car restored back to what it originally was before this incident." Town blames hauling company Calorio alleged that the driver who picked up the loads that spilled Saturday failed to complete several steps that would have prevented the spill from happening. She said the town is seeking to recoup cleanup expenses from the company that holds the hauling contract. "It appears that (the driver) may have known that he was slushing out of the vehicle, but they didn't report anything to us," Calorio said. Calorio said the hauls are supposed to contain dehydrated wastewater sludge, known as cake, however, she said a valve leak in the facility's centrifuge "put a layer of water on the top of the dry cake material" that splashed out of the trailers during the hauls. Calorio said haulers are supposed to inspect each load, pull a sample from the cake and fully secure their trailer — safety measures that if followed, should have resulted in the discovery of the water. Calorio did not return a request for the name of the hauling company. Calorio said the spill is not related to the moratorium on new sewer connections to the plant, which serves Killingly and Brooklyn, that the town established in July. Calorio said the town did not issue a community alert for the spill because "it wasn't significant." Calorio said that when the town realized that part of the access road was impacted, the area had already been salted and sanded and the spill "was pretty well absorbed." State police said troopers responded to a report of a spill at 1:37 a.m. Police said waste treatment staff "verified that the spillage was water only and did not contain any actual waste" and that the Department of Transportation treated "the roadway to mitigate potential freezing." Police did not disclose whether the original report came from the driver, an employee at the plant or a citizen. Calorio said municipal crews arrived at the site of the spill at 6 a.m. and applied additional rounds of sand and salt to the road, which she described as "a pretty typical procedure for this type of response." Calorio said a Department of Energy and Environmental Protection officer responded at 11 a.m. to evaluate the site. Calorio said DEEP's representative encouraged the town, "out of an abundance of caution," to hire Kropp Environmental Contractors for further sanitation, which Calorio said the company completed by 4 p.m. Saturday. The intervention came too late for those who unwittingly drove through the spill site Saturday morning. Brooklyn resident Carrie Juhasz said the sludge under her wheels as she drove up the Exit 37 ramp around 10 a.m. Saturday, felt like "driving through a couple of inches of thick slushy snow." "When I arrived at my destination and got out of my car, it was like the smell was overwhelming," Juhasz said. After one car wash, Jushasz said she considers herself lucky that "the majority of the bad smell has now gone away." a.cross@theday.com