CITY'S WATER SUPPLY REMAINS SAFE

City and county officials say Cape Girardeau's water supply remains safe, despite the fact that the flood has greatly increased the amount of raw sewage being dumped into the Mississippi River.

Like many other cities up and down the river, Cape Girardeau currently is pumping raw sewage into the river because its sewage disposal plant is being bypassed. That is occurring because of the extreme amount of water running through the plant and because the trucks that haul away the solids after treatment no longer can reach the plant.

Shifts of workers who are keeping the pumps running 24 hours a day are being ferried to the plant, located at Cooper and Third Street in South Cape, by boat.

But Water Systems Manager Tom Taggart says the city's normal filtration and disinfection system will kill the additional organisms and viruses being deposited into the river upstream. The high degree of dilution that accompanies flooding also helps, he says.

The city's water supply has safeguards expected to prevent the contamination which has occurred in Des Moines.

Cape Girardeau has two sources of water. At 118 feet above the river level, the Cape Rock Water Treatment Plant is virtually immune from flooding.

River water is pumped to the plant from an intake structure at the river. Backup diesel pumps have been installed as a precaution against a 48-foot crest which would put the existing pumps out of action. Those pumps already have been positioned five feet higher than normal.

In addition, the city's Ramsey Branch Water Treatment Plant receives ground water from wells positioned about 30 feet above the flood plain. The river would have to rise to 50 feet to threaten the plant.

Charlotte Craig, director of the Cape Girardeau County Health Department, said the fact that raw sewage is being dumped into the Mississippi by localities up and down the river does not pose a health risk. "Anytime you have raw sewage you don't like it. Aesthetically, it's not pleasing, but a lot of cities do that routinely."

In particular, the state Department of Health, in a determination reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, has said the flood waters do not significantly increase the risk of contracting hepatitis A.

Though a large number of cases of hepatitis A have been reported in the St. Louis area in recent months, health officials say the dosage necessary to transmit the virus is large enough "as to make it exceeding unlikely that this dosage would be present in the flood waters."

According to Dr. Denny Donnell of the state Department of Health in Jefferson City, there is no record of hepatitus A ever being passed along by flooding.

However, the danger remains for anyone who comes into contact with untreated sewage. Craig said her office gave 130 tetanus booster shots Tuesday, 30 were administered at Red Star Baptist Church and county nurses working in Dutchtown dispensed an uncounted number of shots.

The city's sewage disposal plant can return to operation once the river level drops to about 40 feet, according to Doug Leslie, the city's director of Public Works.

Normally, the plant daily gleans about 10,000 gallons of waste sludge from the sewer-fed waters that flow through it. That sludge is used to fertilize farm fields.

Normally, the plant's equipment can measure a water flow of up to 17 million gallons per day, but the amount of water now flushing through is unmeasurable, Leslie said.

"Essentially, all of the river is going through the sewage plant."

Leslie said the department is checking the city's sewer lines to make sure the system is operating as expected. So far, the manhole at the foot of Broadway is the only one that has been sandbagged. It's part of a separate system, Leslie said. "That's river water backing into that system."

Public works also has been making round-the-clock deliveries of sand to three sandbagging sites in the city Red Star Baptist Church, Meadowbrook and Larry streets in South Cape, and the Main Street Parking lot near Aquamsi.

So far, everything is being done in anticipation of Tuesday's predicted 45-foot crest.

"We will be part of the cleanup," Leslie assured. "We will have a lot of solid waste."

Taggart said samples from the water treatment system are analyzed continuously. The amount of organic matter encountered in the system "comes and goes constantly," and has not been unusually high, he added.

According to a statement from the Cape Girardeau Police Department, no boiling of water or any other precaution is necessary.