Jul. 22--The unusual case of the blue stream is closed.

It was May 21, 2008, when Eden Prairie office workers at 6200 Baker Road noticed that the stream flowing into a wetland on their property had turned bright blue.

When they called City Hall to report a paint or dye discharge into the stream, environmental coordinator Leslie Stovring called the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) for help and went out to take a look.

The color was traced to the parking lot of the nearby Life Time Fitness where a contractor -- Ace Surfaces of North America, a Florida-based company -- had just painted tennis courts and cleaned latex paint buckets and brushes at a storm-sewer drain, Stovring said.

"They had a stack of buckets, 30 to 40 five-gallon barrels of paint, mostly blue, that they were cleaning out," Stovring said.

She could not see below the surface of the water in the stream because it was such a vivid blue.

"It was just astounding to me that they would put that much bright blue paint down" the drain and not know where it was going, Stovring said.

Ace Surfaces President Franz Fasold said the workers thought they were legally washing water-based paint off tools into a sanitary sewer. "We are very environmentally conscious and sensitive," he said.

But the storm drain flowed from the parking lot at Life Time Fitness through a culvert under the street into a stream leading to a wetland area. "We didn't want it to go north into Minnetonka because Glen Lake is right there," Stovring said. "We wanted to stop it before it got to the lake."

The MPCA's emergency response team, West Central Environmental Consultants, arrived shortly to confine the paint and clean up the creek.

Using a suction truck, the team removed the water and cleaned the stream bed, then flushed the storm sewer and sucked that water out of the creek as well, said Chelsea Domeier, a pollution control specialist for the MPCA.

The agency considered the incident unusual and serious, MPCA officials said.

Cost of the cleanup was $7,775. The MPCA required Ace Surfaces to pay those costs, plus a fine of $3,500.

Laurie Blake --612-673-1711

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