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The following are facts related to the June 23rd bypass and the Pewaukee Beach closing.

The bypass that occurred did not discharge into the lake. The bypass discharged into a wetland complex that does not have direct drainage to the lake.

The sample that closed the beach on the 24th was taken on the 23rd at the same time of the bypass. It would have been impossible for bacteria from the bypass to instantly travel overland three miles to taint a water sample being taken at the village beach.

The District requested the Park and Recreation department have a water sample taken to determine if the E-coli was human or animal. This was not done.

It is unfortunate that media coverage came up with a cause for this problem without the facts. That quick solution allowed a serious health problem and its cause to go uninvestigated. I would suggest that additional testing be done using the same protocol as the high level tests and if these tests come back positive, find the cause. Actions could then be taken to prevent closings in the future.

Bypasses, though rare have occurred in the past during flood events. This bypass was caused by saturated ground followed by 3.5 inches of rain in an hour that caused basement flooding with rainwater. This rainwater draining or being pumped into the sanitary sewer caused extremely high flows. Our system is designed to pump this type of flow if it is normal sewage. This high flow instantly flushed items to our pump stations that under normal circumstances would have arrived a little at a time and in most cases would be pumped on. Two of our nine hundred gallon per minute pumps plugged up. The remaining pump could not handle the flow and without a bypass basements would have been flooded with sewage. The two pumps were dismantled and cleaned and as soon as normal operations could resume the bypass was stopped.

What could plug such a large pump? The arrival of things like t-shirts, underwear, sweatshirts, rags, mop heads, rubber gloves, condoms, rope, tampon applicators and countless other items that we can't or don't want to identify. These are things that should not be flushed. Anything that is labeled disposable means you can throw it away, not flush it down the toilet. These items frequently plug up our pumps and under normal flows we can do the repairs without interrupting service. We have tried to educate our homeowners on this issue with newsletter and newspaper articles and television coverage to no avail. This is a problem for all the sanitary collection systems I have talked to.

We take our responsibility to provide quality service to our residents very seriously. We maintain our lines, pump stations and generators to the highest standards. We provide 24 hour emergency service, 365 days a year in our efforts to keep our system flowing without interruption. Our goal has always been and will continue to be that all of our flow ends up in the City of Brookfield, wastewater treatment plant were it belongs.