(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
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State fines Mason City schools for river pollution [1]
['Jared Strong', 'More From Author', '- August']
Date: 2022-08-26
A company hired to construct the Mason City school district’s new indoor pool and fieldhouse pumped sediment-laden water into the nearby Winnebago River late last year, a violation of state water quality rules, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
The DNR recently fined the school district $8,000 for the violation.
It happened Nov. 19, 2021, after Henkel Construction Company had excavated a dish for the pool and dug into a swath of clay. The dish began to fill with groundwater, and workers pumped it into a storm drain that flows into the river, the DNR reported.
“It was very heavily clay-laden water that was coming out of that hole,” said Dan Bratrud, an environmental specialist for the DNR who investigated the incident. “It was going directly into a storm drain that was less than a quarter mile from the river.”
Bratrud said two separate passersby reported the murky discharge into the river to the DNR, along with someone employed by the city of Mason City. He estimated that workers pumped hundreds or thousands of gallons of the dirty water over the course of about six hours.
After Bratrud intervened, the workers began pumping the water onto a nearby grassy area instead.
“Luckily for them it didn’t cause any long-term problems,” Bratrud said. “There was no fish kill. It was all aesthetic, but the samples did come back very high for suspended solids.”
He said the river was big enough and had sufficient flow to confine the discharge to roughly a quarter of the total width of the river. When sediment-filled water consumes the full width, it can cut the amount of oxygen available for aquatic life.
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