Old practices blamed for death at plant

Bad habits got in the way of safety at Spokane’s wastewater treatment plant and contributed to a sludge tank accident last May 10 that claimed the life of maintenance worker Mike Cmos Jr., a mayor’s oversight committee found.

“The committee has concluded that the event in question was the result of decades of actions and omissions that cumulatively contributed to a tragic event,” according to the report issued Monday.

Nearly one year after the accident, the plant has undergone a series of changes in an effort to fix problems discovered through investigations, officials said.

The City Council on Monday approved hiring 12 new employees in the wastewater utility, including nine workers who will be assigned to jobs intended to improve plant safety. The cost of the additional staff will be about $455,000 a year to be paid through the city’s sewer utility rate collections. The sewer plant has been renamed the Riverside Park Water Reclamation Facility.

Councilman Bob Apple cast the only vote against the budget increase. He said hiring should be done gradually to ensure that all 12 new employees are needed.

Retired Superior Court Judge Harold D. Clarke, chairman of the oversight committee, appeared before the council Monday night to present the report with its 13 recommendations. Among them are calls for hiring more staff, cross-training employees, installing redundant monitors, improving management leadership and establishing an independent oversight body, Clarke said.

The report said that city officials from Mayor Jim West down cooperated in investigations and “made no attempt to pin the blame on a convenient scapegoat or to otherwise avoid taking responsibility for the incident.”

The committee found that prior to the accident, plant operators focused too much time and effort on stopping odors from escaping into an adjoining neighborhood, so much so that it “unintentionally compromised” plant safety.

In addition, operation issues tended to get a reactive, piecemeal response. Better planning is needed, the committee said.

But there was “no evidence that there was any malice or outright neglect on the part of any individual manager or employee,” the committee said.

“The data we reviewed, however, point to a situation in which management and employees at all levels did not take sufficient ownership of their roles and responsibilities as they affected the overall safety and operation” of the plant. That was exacerbated by inadequate communication and cooperation among personnel, the committee said.

As a result, “both management and employees bear responsibility for some of the conditions that led to this terrible event.”

Much of the report was written by J. Michael Stebbins, director of the Gonzaga University Institute of Ethics, city staff members said. Other committee members were Beth Thew, of the Spokane Regional Labor Council; Bill Williams, founder and chairman of Telect Inc.; and City Councilman Al French.

The accident occurred when too much sludge was pumped into digester No. 3, which caused its dome-shaped concrete roof to separate violently from the tank walls. Cmos was on top of the roof attempting to contain leaking sludge. His body was recovered two days later from near the bottom of the tank after most of the remaining sludge was pumped out. Three other workers were injured.

The plant’s three digesters each have a capacity of 2 million gallons and use heat and anaerobic bacteria to process the slurrylike sludge into a safe fertilizer product. Since the accident, the 27-year-old plant has operated with its two remaining digesters. The city has hired its ongoing consultant to design two new egg-shaped steel digester tanks with a capacity of 2.8 million gallons each. No decision has been made on what to do with the crippled digester No. 3.

Investigators said that sensors in the failed digester apparently gave plant operators incorrect readings of sludge levels before the accident. In addition, plant improvements had changed the way sludge was being processed.

“The accident was an extremely sobering experience,” and some employees have retired as a result, said Mike Coster, acting operations superintendent at the plant.

Since the accident, management duties have been split between Coster and Tim Pelton, who was reassigned from overall superintendent to the newly created technical administrative superintendent. Pelton oversees issues of environmental quality and permit compliance and oversees multi-million-dollar, state-mandated improvements to the plant.

Coster said plans call for upgrading the two remaining digesters so that they have redundant monitoring systems, which are now the state of the art in sewage processing.

“We are certainly trying to increase specific accountability down here,” he said.

The state Department of Labor and Industries uncovered 16 violations and initially fined the city $66,600 for its failures in overall supervision, involving inadequate written procedures, hazard analyses, operating manuals and training regimens. The fine was later reduced to $22,000. A separate investigation by Exponent of Menlo Park, Calif., documented details of what went wrong.

The mayor’s committee said the “ultimate cause has been very difficult to ascertain.”