Earlier this year, George Virgo was puttering around his store, preparing for an influx of weekend paddlers. He’s the general manager of operations at the Roswell and Sandy Springs locations of Nantahala Outdoors Center, an outfitter that rents tubes and kayaks along the Chattahoochee River.
Summer is a busy time, and holiday weekends in the summer are even busier.
So he found himself in a tough spot when, in the summer of 2023, a big stretch of the river, including around one of his shops, was closed to recreation.
Atlantans might remember: A massive sewage spill closed down over 15 miles of the Chattahoochee for several weeks due to the public health risk.
All told, tens of millions of gallons of barely-treated sewage poured into the Chattahoochee River that summer, with toilet paper visible in the water near the source and bacteria that threatened people’s health rising to dangerous levels in popular recreation spots.
“I mean, it couldn’t have come at a worse time in the summer, it being during the 4th of July,” Virgo said. It was, he said, “a major revenue impact.”
And it didn’t just hit his bottom line. He lost employees, too — seasonal workers who couldn’t go an undetermined amount of time without full pay, despite Virgo’s efforts to shuffle staff around to the company’s open locations elsewhere.
But even so, Virgo said he understands why the river had to be closed. It was dangerous for people to be in it because the sewage was causing high levels of e. Coli and other bacteria that can cause diarrhea, vomiting and more.
The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper’s Neighborhood Water Watch volunteer program collects water samples regularly at a Johnson Ferry site — it’s their closest sampling site to the Big Creek plant. This chart shows e. Coli levels measured at that location throughout four years.
Closing the river
Early in June of 2023, e. Coli levels indicating a sewage problem were extremely high and getting worse, according to the National Park Service and Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
“If humans came in contact with that water, there was a higher probability that someone could get sick,” said Annie Couch, park hydrologist at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.
After a few weeks of concerning results, the Park Service started closing parts of the river to recreation on June 30, 2023.
At this point, after weeks of collaboration and investigation with local partners, the Park Service had a pretty good idea of where the sewage was coming from. But the actual source hadn’t been verified yet, meaning the problem wasn’t getting fixed.
There also hadn’t yet been a public announcement about the pollution. Couch said that element, along with the closure, was key because the usual places people might check for water safety information didn’t present an accurate picture of the public health risks.
Notifying the community
Couch typically refers river-goers to BacteriAlert, a partnership between the Park Service, the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and the U.S. Geological Survey. It’s accessible online, and it uses environmental data like stream flow, water temperature and more from in-stream monitors to predict the e. Coli levels in the river.
It’s useful because regular e. Coli samples take a full day to get results, so Couch said BacteriAlert is the best place to get an idea of real-time conditions in the river.
She said the model is usually accurate. But it can’t predict a sewage spill.
Georgians can see sewage spills on the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s daily sewage spill report online. But in this case, the source of the sewage was never classified as a spill, so it wouldn’t have shown up on the public spill log either.
Investigating the source
Without any spill notifications, the National Park Service and its partners dug into figuring out the source of the e. Coli.
How hard that ended up being is why some are still concerned about that spill more than a year after it happened.
On a recent summer day, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Jason Ulseth drove a boat gliding over the shallow waters of the Chattahoochee River. He pulled up to a large pipe where water flowed out in sheets. This is one of the places where a lot of Atlanta’s treated sewage — what goes down the toilet and then through a wastewater treatment plant — is returned to the river.
Ulseth and his team routinely check water quality up and down the Chattahoochee. When everything is working properly, even testing the river here at a water treatment plant outflow shouldn’t turn up dangerously high levels of bacteria.
When they do find pollution indicating a sewage leak or spill, the Riverkeeper team will test in different locations until they pinpoint the source. Ulseth said it usually turns out to be a broken pipe or manhole. His group notifies the utility responsible, workers come out and fix it — case closed.
But the spike in e. Coli levels in June of 2023 wasn’t turning out to be a simple case.
For weeks, Ulseth and others searched for the source of the problem. Until, towards the end of the month, they caught a break.
They came across a place in the river where toilet paper was floating atop the water. Ulseth looked closely and realized it was coming out of a pipe at the bottom of the river.
They had found the culprit: a pipe, deep underwater, that pumped treated wastewater out of Fulton County’s Big Creek Water Reclamation Plant.
“We were testing directly at the pipe as it goes into the river. We could see toilet paper, smell sewage and our e. Coli levels were through the roof,” said Ulseth.
But finding the source of the problem didn’t lead to a quick fix in this case.
The nonprofit notified Fulton County that its wastewater treatment center was offline.
“And they had no idea,” Ulseth said. “When we told Fulton County that there was a major problem at the treatment plant, they denied it 100 percent.”
He said it took Fulton two to three more days to come back and confirm the plant actually wasn’t working properly.
But while Ulseth had been detecting pollution in the river for weeks, Fulton said the problem had only just started. The county maintained that the tests it had been doing for most of June had shown the plant was operating fine, and the water coming out of it was treated.
To Ulseth, the timeline doesn’t make sense.
“What were they testing during that period, and claiming to have clean results?” Ulseth said. “We’ve never heard an explanation of why that is.”
David Clark, Fulton County director of Public Works, said he doesn’t have an answer, either.
“I can’t explain why the tests… from the plants that shows everything was fine and their tests showing that everything in the river was questionable aren’t in line,” he said.
Fulton County has maintained that something must have suddenly knocked the plant out of working order.
Because, according to Clark, Big Creek staff tested the water coming out of the plant three times a week. On top of that, they tested individual steps of the treatment process every four to six hours. So the spill must have happened fast, in the hours between some of those frequent tests.
“It’s not necessarily outside of the realm of possibility that a two o’clock test looked fine. And then six hours later at eight o’clock, things were bad,” he said.
All the tests in the weeks leading up to the Riverkeeper reaching out to Fulton were clean, Clark said. The staff doing those tests were employees of Veolia Water North America, Fulton County’s contractor which operated the plant. Veolia declined to comment for this story.
Clark said a chemical must have entered the plant and caused it to malfunction.
Sampling sites above and below the Big Creek Water Reclamation Plant. Fulton County submitted data, however before Jul. 1, 2023, it did not record detectable levels of e. Coli in water leaving its Big Creek plant that would appear on this chart. The dotted line represents the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safe e. Coli levels for recreation.
This isn’t unheard of in the world of wastewater, Clark said. Wastewater treatment plants often have industrial clients that clean their own water before sending it to plants like Big Creek. It’s possible an industrial customer didn’t do this correctly or that someone illegally dumped the chemical in a storm drain to dispose of it for free.
And yet, he also concedes equipment at the plant probably didn’t get as much preventative maintenance as it could have. At the time of the spill, Fulton was almost done building a new expansion right next door to increase Big Creek’s capacity.
“I think, you know, in hindsight, they probably made some choices not to do some maintenance, because they knew that piece of equipment was going to be mothballed,” Clark said.
Eliminating other variables
According to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, there’s no indication the sewage the Riverkeeper had been detecting for weeks could have come from anywhere besides the Fulton plant.
The agency said there were some other minor sewage spills in Fulton and Cobb Counties during the same time period, but none of them reached the main stem of the Chattahoochee. The agency said it is unlikely any of them had any effects on the e. Coli levels the Riverkeeper and Park Service were finding.
Additionally, none of the parties WABE interviewed said that any pipe, manhole or other spills were found that could have contributed to the high e. Coli levels, either.
BacteriAlert’s model says it wasn’t due to environmental conditions like regular rain-related runoff, or temperature or dirt getting kicked up in the river.
The EPD asked Fulton County to investigate who might have released the suspected chemical that led to the spill, but the county didn’t find a culprit.
So the question of whose timeline is accurate has never been settled.
However, Clark said that during the spill, Fulton followed all the correct protocols for notifying the government and public about the problem.
“I’m very pleased that we were able to respond as quickly and get everything back into compliance within about a two-week period after we became aware of it,” he said.
Enforcement
Ultimately, the EPD fined Fulton about $163,000 and required more measures to prevent something like the giant spill from recurring, including increasing the number of days per week the facility tests water going into the river.
Public comments to the EPD called the fine “minimal,” and said it wasn’t large enough to deter Fulton County from allowing something like this again.
The EPD also conducted follow-up visits earlier this year. During a visit in January, EPD investigators witnessed an ongoing, unreported sewage spill actively happening. The investigators noted in the report that on-site staff were supposed to get samples of what was being illegally released into the river from the facility, but had failed to do so.
Clark said that before the spill, Big Creek was an award-winning facility — one of the best of the best.
Overall, he said he feels confident in Fulton’s response to the events, and that his department and the county had worked with regulators to get Big Creek back into compliance with clean water laws.
Virgo from Nantahala Outdoors Center said his company crunched the numbers for how much money they lost during the river shutdown.
“We have a pretty good estimate, and it’s considerably larger than the fine that was given out,” Virgo said.
Earlier this year, the National Park Service released annual numbers. While parks around the country saw more visitors last year than the year before, the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area was down 10%. Officials said that was in part because of the sewage spill-related closures.
The whole incident, even over a year later, still haunts Ulseth with Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
“It sucks that we’re in this position,” he said.
He said this spill, and others like it, undo the work groups like his have done to try to show people the Chattahoochee is a valuable resource, worth protecting and – usually – safe to enjoy.
He says for himself and others, how Fulton County and state environmental regulators handled the Big Creek spill raises questions about how seriously they took this sewage spill as a real public health threat — and how they’ll handle spills in the future.
WABE will continue to report on sewage pollution in metro Atlanta. To submit a tip, email mmecke@wabe.org.
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