It was a spill that lasted about 36 hours, but left millions of gallons of waste water spewing into Onondaga Lake last week. Corina Cappabianca spoke with a Syracuse University assistant professor about potential impacts to the body of water. The volume of the lake itself is about 35 billion gallons according to the DEC a the amount of raw sewage that spilled was about 11million gallons. To put things in perspective, that's about 16 Olympic sized swimming pools worth of waste.

 

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Storms last Friday caused a pipe to release the waste water in Onondaga Lake by the Inner Harbor.

On Thursday, some officials said the spill shouldn't be a long-term concern.

"Even with a discharge, even of this size, and the size of the water body it's going into, we don't believe there were any significant long term effects for either public health or even the environment," said Tom Rhoads, Department of Water Environment Protection Commissioner..

However, Teng Zeng, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Syracuse University, says it's tough to assess potential impacts at this point.

"We have 11 million gallons of this raw sewage that actually goes in the lake," Zeng said. "I think there will be some impacts definitely on the water quality, but on the other hand the lake has the dilution effect."

Zeng says one issue could be bacteria.

"We might have some bacteria that just enter the lake through the spill and that is more directly relevant to us because if we are doing some recreational activities on the lake, then we don't want to have bacteria swimming around us," said Zeng.

An even bigger issue could be other contaminants people might flush down the drain.

"Those are harder to monitor because for example pharmaceuticals and some other trace, organic pollutants, sometimes they don't have this acute health impact, but they can be bad in the long-term," said Zeng.

Zeng says how long it takes for the waste water to be mixed and diluted depends on the flow rates of the lake.

Rhoads says the bacterium from humans that becomes part of waste water has a shelf life of less than 48 hours, leading to natural disposition.

Crews will repair the pipe this weekend and hope to be done with the project by Monday. They've also put chlorine into the lake.