As has only just become known, last Friday an estimated 100 liters of chromium-containing rinsing waste water was discharged into the sewage system at an industrial company in the Swiss Lake Constance municipality of Steinach (Vorarlberg) without pre-treatment and subsequently ended up in Lake Constance. The police have started investigations.
Due to a suspected technical defect in the overflow protection of one of the company’s catch basins, around 100 liters of flushing water had to be pumped into an intermediate tank shortly after 2 p.m. last Friday. Since the slide of the intermediate tank was open, an estimated 100 liters of chromium-containing water got into the sewage system and the local wastewater treatment plant (ARA). There, the chromium-containing wastewater could not be held back due to the rainy weather and was fed into Lake Constance via the Steinach-Morgental ARA sea pipeline . Due to the strong dilution in the sewer network, in the WWTP stormwater tank and in the sea pipeline, the Swiss authorities assume, based on current knowledge, that the discharge conditions have been complied with and that the industry limit values for chromium in the wastewater have been exceeded The ARA and the environmental damage service of the Canton of St. Gallen notice the environmental event. This, in turn, informed the cantonal police on Monday morning, who carried out an inventory of the facts and, in cooperation with the canton’s public prosecutor’s office, checked the existence of criminally relevant behavior.
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