This is a photograph of a stream in Eden Prairie. It was taken two weeks ago. It is a real photograph. It is untouched by Photoshop or any other kind of Internet fakery.
It’s blue. More accurately, it’s Smurf-Blue. The reason it’s blue is that the foolish employees of a painting contractor working on a project near the intersection of Hwy 62 and Baker Road decided to flush extra paint and washed out painting equipment down what they thought was a sanitary sewer. It turned out to be a storm sewer, which led to this creek, which drains north into the Glen Lake area of Minnetonka.
There were some poor decisions made in this matter. First off, the painting contractor’s employees should not have tried to dump their waste into our sewer system. It did not matter if they thought it was going into a sanitary sewer. That’s not allowed either. The second bad decision was to dump it and leave it.
We found it because some office workers in the area saw it and called our offices in City Hall. Our environmental protection employees followed-up on the calls. They contacted the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Eden Prairie Police. The MPCA made sure that the mess got cleaned up and the Police made sure that the mess was properly documented, because somebody is going to get in some real trouble for this one.
