FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Red warning signs at the entrance gate to Fairhope Municipal Beach and at Orange Street Park were expected to come down two days after they were posted, said Teddy King, the environmental supervisor for the Baldwin County Health Department.

“Those red signs were posted Sunday to be on the safe side,” King said Tuesday morning. “They will go to green today.”

The signs were posted as a precaution before test results had been received following the discovery Sunday morning that approximately 300,000 gallons of partially treated sewage was discharged into Mobile Bay from an outfall pipe about 3,000 yards west of the beach.

King said preliminary results from Monday testing indicated the limits would be below the number requiring the posting of swimming advisory signs.

A city employee at the beach entrance said traffic at the beach was slow Monday with Aug. 10 being the first day of school. But one family that did come with a small child decided not to use the beach after they were warned about the swimming advisory, he said.

“No, we won’t be going back in,” Bryce McGartha, 25, said Monday. He said he and his girlfriend had been swimming for about an hour and were suprised to learn about the swimming advisory. They were the only two people on the beach, but a man throwing a cast net from a nearby pier also said he did not know of the advisory.

The sewage spill was discovered at about 8:30 Sunday morning, said Dan McCrory, the city’s water and sewer superintendent.

He said that a motor on a rotating arm at one of the treatment ponds at the wastewater treatment plant burned out either late Saturday or early Sunday, which in turn tripped a main breaker switch.

“That shut down the treatment plant,” McCrory said. “We’ve had electrical engineers looking into why that happened.”

McCrory said he believes the plant was shut down for about seven hours.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out, the exact length of time,” he said. “But we probably had the plant back up and running within two hours of discovery.”

During the shut down, wastewater did not receive the final stage of treatment when the water is exposed to ultraviolet light and disinfected.

“That kills the bacteria in the water,” McCrory said.

The treatment process takes about 36 to 48 hours, as water travels slowly through several containment ponds and processes, and it would take a shut down of almost two days for completely untreated wastewater to be discharged into the bay, he said.

“(The city) did notify the department of the event that happened on Aug. 8 and have already submitted a report on what caused the problem and the steps they have taken to correct the problem,” said Scott Hughes, spokesman for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. “It is important to note that the wastewater that was discharged had already undergone several steps in the treatment process, so it was not raw sewage that was discharged.”

McCrory said the plant has about 8,400 customers and that approximately 1.7 million gallons of sewage is treated and discharged per day.

“As noted in the press release by the Alabama Department of Public Health, citizens shold exercise caution for a few days until natural processes can resolve any environmental impacts that might have occurred,” Hughes said.

That health department press release was issued Sunday afternoon and also encouraged people to “thoroughly cook and fish or seafood caught nearby and wash hands after handling fish or seafood.”