King County's sewer utility crews responded early Saturday morning to a small wastewater overflow at the Murray Avenue pump station after a power failure shut down pumping equipment about 4:30 a.m.

A backup power generator came on about 10 minutes after the initial outage and enabled the pump station to resume normal operations.

It's estimated that between 500 and 1,000 gallons of wastewater flowed into Puget Sound while power was off at the pump station. Normally, the Murray pump station handles about 2.2 million gallons of wastewater per day.

To protect public health, the county posted the nearby beach area as closed, took water samples, and told health and regulatory agencies about the overflow.

The Murray Avenue pump station pushes wastewater from homes and businesses in West Seattle to King County's West Point Treatment Plant in the Magnolia neighborhood. King County treats about 170 million gallons of wastewater per day at its two regional treatment plants.