Two of the city’s most prominent landlords and businessmen are accused of dumping raw sewage into the Merrimack River for up to a decade, according to a report in the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.

Citing court documents, the newspaper reported Juan and Luis Yepez, who own a pair of rehabbed mill buildings in downtown Lawrence, are accused of hooking their buildings up to a pipe that empties into a raceway underneath the buildings, which then empty into the Merrimack.

The dumping may have begun as early as 2010, when nonprofit developer Lawrence Community Works sold the Yepezes 1 Union St., a 63,000-square-foot building adjacent to another of LCW’s buildings. When LCW began to renovate its building, it severed the sewer connection between the two. At that point, the brothers connected the Union Street building to pipes leading to another of their buildings nearby, which plans showed also connected to the city’s sewers but in fact was apparently connected to the underground raceway.

The state was alerted to the situation in 2016, and years of wrangling followed, between state environmental authorities, LCW and the Yepezes, over how to connect the buildings to the city’s sewers. The sewage in the raceway is currently being pumped out by trucks on a regular basis, the paper reports.