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Portland Oregonian
Copyright (c) The Oregonian 2002
Sunday, January 27, 2002
NORTHWEST OREGON & THE WEST
SEWAGE FORCES CITIES TO DIG DEEP
JIM LYNCH - The Oregonian
Summary: Portland and Seattle are banking on huge, costly tunnel
projects to help put a lid on waste overflows as well as rising sewer
bills
Few people here know that a machine named Cassandra is drilling a
massive tunnel beneath Queen Anne Hill and the shops and restaurants
along this city's steep northern flank.
The tunnel will be almost 15 feet in diameter and more than a mile
long -- big enough to drive buses through it, but not a single
vehicle will traverse it. And most Seattle residents will never see
it.
The $140 million tunnel project is designed to do nothing but
store and treat overflows of raw sewage that would otherwise spill
into Puget Sound and Lake Union during heavy rains.
The scope of the four-year project hints at the costs and
engineering feats needed to control Seattle's sewage, but it's almost
a modest endeavor compared with Portland's next major sewer tunneling
project, which begins this summer.
A new Portland sewer tunnel will burrow four miles underground and
pass under the Willamette River. The entire project will run about
$260 million -- about what it cost to build the Rose Garden.
Expensive and daunting sewer projects are the latest
infrastructure nightmares in many aging cities across the country.
They're also the main reason sewer bills have doubled in Portland and
Seattle during the past decade and will continue to soar.
The problems are as old as the cities themselves. Original sewer
lines were designed to carry both storm water and sewage to the
nearest bodies of water. As environmental standards evolved, the
sewage was rerouted toward treatment plants. But during rainstorms,
the lines swell with runoff from streets and rooftops, forcing huge
amounts of raw sewage into overflow pipes that still spill into local
waters.
With federal water regulators demanding dramatic reductions in
sewer overflows, pricey infrastructure improvements are needed in
about 900 -- mostly Northern -- cities.
"It's the single-most expensive mandate for municipal governments
to have to adhere to," said Adam Krantz, spokesman for the
Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies.
Krantz says the retrofit costs -- estimated at $75 billion
nationally -- may soon convince members of Congress that cities need
federal cash to help pay for the improvements or otherwise will risk
jeopardizing their credit ratings with massive debts.
Meanwhile, local ratepayers continue to pay the bills.
During the past decade, Portland and Seattle have spent a combined
$500 million cutting sewage overflows in half. Yet problems persist.
About 2.8 billion gallons of combined sewage and storm water
overflow into the Willamette River every year. And Seattle's
overwhelmed pipes dump about 1.5 billion gallons into Puget Sound and
Lake Union.
After exhausting cheaper solutions, both cities are building
massive tunnels to intercept and contain overflows during all but the
worst storms.
Seattle's worst overflow problem is at Myrtle Edwards Park on the
northern tip of its downtown waterfront where an overflow pipe pokes
through a rock bulkhead and spews millions of gallons of storm water
and raw sewage into Puget Sound.
But those overflows, and others across downtown in Lake Union, are
expected to be relics of the city's primitive past once the new
tunnel beneath Queen Anne Hill is finished.
The tunnel is being dug, at the pace of four feet every half-
hour, by crews of six workers and an enormous newfangled drill named
Cassandra owned by Frank Coluccio Construction Co.
The drill is outfitted with a massive rotating disc -- spiked with
metal teeth to bite into the earth -- and a train of carts, conveyor
belts and tools needed to line the tunnel with concrete and haul the
dense glacial soils out.
The Seattle area hopes to eventually reduce its combined sewage
overflows to 300 to 400 million gallons a year, said Christy True,
director of capital improvement projects for King County. "We don't
expect to ever eliminate them entirely," she said.
Portland, meanwhile is halfway through its 20-year plan to reduce
its overflows from 6 billion gallons a year in 1991 to about 250
million in 2011. Its biggest recent coup was the 3.5-mile, 12-foot-
diameter pipe that removed most of the combined overflow into the
Columbia Slough and sends it to a treatment plant.
Construction begins this summer on the more ambitious series of
pipes and pump stations and tunnels designed to intercept the
overflows into the Willamette River from its western banks.
The centerpiece of the project is a four-mile-long, 14-foot-wide
tunnel that burrows under Tom McCall Waterfront Park and the
Willamette River. The tunnel will take four years to build.
When Portland started tackling its overflow problem in 1991, the
average sewer bill was about $14. Now it's $37. By 2011, the average
bill is expected to be about $66.
Dean Marriott, director of the city's environmental services
agency, says it's an awkward job trying to sell angry ratepayers on
the merit of expensive projects that are out of sight and
underground. There's also the rub that ratepayers don't notice any
immediate service improvements. Their toilets don't flush any
differently.
But Marriott says he intends to invite as many people as possible
down to see the new tunnel once it's under construction. Meanwhile,
his agency continues to offer sewer history lessons. "What we've
tried to tell people is this is making up for a legacy of neglect,"
he said.
Bill Dunbar, a spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency's Northwest Region, suggests that public support for expensive
sewer upgrades continues to grow as people slowly become more aware
of the overflow issue.
"I think a lot of folks, including me, really didn't fully
understand that raw sewage continues to be dumped into waters that we
swim in and fish in and play in," Dunbar said.
You can reach Jim Lynch at The Oregonian's Puget Sound bureau at
360-867-9503, or by e-mail at
lynchj@attbi.com.