Liquid flows from a sewer pump station on Magnolia Street in Marion in a frame from a video shared by Forrest Hale
A Marion resident posted video this week of what he described as raw sewage overflowing from a city sewer pump station on Magnolia Street and running downhill into a creek, writing that the city has been called about it multiple times.
Forrest Hale posted the video in a community Facebook group. It shows liquid pouring from a rusted well beside a pump control panel and a green tank. “See this? It’s raw sewage. The pile beside the pipe is exactly what you think it is,” he wrote, adding that it was “all running downhill into a creek, and therefore polluting everything downstream.”
Hale described the site, halfway down the hill on Magnolia Street, as a sanitary sewer overflow point that constantly spills over. The station is supposed to pump sewage back toward the treatment plant, he wrote in reply to a commenter, but the pump is not running. The people who live next to it told him they come home every day to a house that smells like the pile, he wrote.
Sanitary sewer overflows must be reported to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management electronically through the state’s permitting and compliance system, and ADEM posts reported overflows on a public map for 10 days after the overflow stops.
The city is working under an ADEM deadline to finish a federally funded sewer project before its American Rescue Plan Act money expires Dec. 31, after the agency warned in March that Marion did not appear to be on track.
