The spill involving just over a million gallons of storm water and untreated sewage will affect the Chemung River in Elmira for a while. Intense rainfall caused three locations on Water Street to spill sewage into the river on Monday. According to the Chemung County health department, this isn’t as uncommon as you might think. The facility handles 31 million gallons of water each day and the river itself flows about 17-million gallons per hour, so the sewage was diluted fairly quickly. Officials say the system is designed to release automatically at certain overflow levels to prevent the sewage from backing up into homes and storm drains. The health department does not recommend swimming in the river at any point throughout the year.
