Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
The Washington Post
Copyright 2001, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
Sunday, August 19, 2001
A Section
Area Sewers Plagued by Waste Spills; Billions of Gallons Leak Out of Systems
Each Year
Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Frank and Mary Wilson's home has never been declared a federal disaster
area. Health officials and Red Cross volunteers have never descended to
mop up raw sewage and tally the damage.
But don't think the Wilsons can't sympathize with Washington's flood
victims.
Their Beltsville basement -- 20 miles away from the center of last
weekend's damage -- has been flooded with sewage so many times that
they've installed a pump to shoot it into the street.
"I can always tell when there's been a spill," Frank Wilson said. "The
smell."
While sewage spills as severe as last weekend's are extremely rare,
spills themselves are not. Across the Washington area each year, from
the newest suburbs to remote rural areas, millions of gallons of human
waste spill from pipes and seep through manholes, down residential
streets and into creeks and rivers. Sometimes it backs up into people's
homes.
Just below the surface, the thousands of miles of pipeline that carry
the region's waste are routinely cracked by tree roots or clogged by
grease or vandals. And a burgeoning population is stressing some systems
as never before.
In May 2000, 10 million gallons spilled after a treatment plant in
Upper Marlboro lost power for almost 12 hours during a storm. Just this
spring, raw sewage backed up into the kitchen of a Fairfax County
elementary school, forcing cooks to throw away the lunch they were
preparing.
Maryland and Northern Virginia reported 1,492 spills totaling 345
million gallons between 1998 and 2000, according to a Washington Post
analysis of sewage records. And each year the District has about 75
spills that dump about 3 billion gallons of storm water contaminated
with raw sewage.
Compared with the more tangible costs of growth -- such as new schools
and roads -- the region's underground infrastructure has received scant
attention until recently, some politicians and industry officials say.
Now local jurisdictions are trying to figure out how to update their
systems -- and how to pay for it. In Maryland alone, the price tag is
expected to be as high as $1 billion.
"We are sitting on a potential crisis in water and wastewater, and no
one is focusing on it because these pipes are underground -- out of
sight and out of mind," said Ken Kirk, executive director of the
Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies. "People assume that they
turn on the tap and the water that comes out is going to be good; they
flush the toilet and assume it's going away. But these pipes are old --
very, very old."
Preventing Spills
One morning near the end of May, workers from the Washington Suburban
Sanitary Commission pried off a manhole cover on Montgomery Road in
Beltsville and lowered a robotic camera into the sewer line.
The neighbors had been complaining. There had been a sewage spill --
again. And so the WSSC, which serves Montgomery and Prince George's
counties, sent a crew to investigate. The camera crawled through the
pipe and broadcast an image to a television in a truck parked on the
street. Soon the cause of the spill was evident: A big mess of tree
roots and grease had clogged the pipe like cholesterol blocking an
artery.
The sewage that had backed up into four homes -- including the Wilsons'
-- included the contents of what they had flushed down their toilets and
sinks. But such spills often contain storm water and other pollutants
too. Such spills, wastewater officials say, are unfortunate -- and
largely unavoidable.
"The fact is, you can't build a wastewater system that is spill-proof.
It can't be done," Kirk said. "You're going to have communities spending
billions of dollars to upgrade these systems, and you're still going to
have spills."
WSSC officials inspect lines every day, flying over those in remote
areas twice a year. They've begun a public education campaign called
"Cease the Grease" designed to curb the amounts of line-clogging
materials flushed down toilets and poured down drains.
Like other area utilities, WSSC spills only a fraction of what is
treated properly. Officials say they do everything they can to prevent
spills, clean them up when they do happen and protect the public. But
environmentalists say utilities could do more.
"The bulk of these overflows happened because of inadequate maintenance
and capacity," said Nancy Stoner, of the Natural Resources Defense
Council, a national environmental group. "Cities are not investing
enough in maintaining their current systems."
Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director of 1000 Friends of Maryland, a
nonprofit group that combats sprawl, said tax money has gone largely to
the more tangible elements of growth, and sewer systems have been
overlooked.
"It's a whole lot easier for a council person or some other politician
to ask for money for something that's visible, like a road or a school,
instead of money for something like an underground sewage pipe," she
said. "It's not a sexy topic."
The Size of the Problem
It was about 9 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, and kitchen staff members at
Fort Belvoir Elementary School in Fairfax County was cooking lunch when
they noticed a foul-smelling liquid bubbling up through a drain in the
floor.
It was raw sewage that had backed up from a clogged pipe, and it was
flowing steadily across the floor. The workers threw away the burgers
and burritos they were preparing and ordered bag lunches for the
school's 1,300 children.
Teachers told the kids not to use the bathroom "because if we continued
to flush toilets, more wastewater would come into the building and we'd
really flood ourselves out," said Mark La Croix, coordinator of
environmental health for the school system.
No one got sick that day, but untreated sewage causes 1.8 million to
3.6 million illnesses annually in the United States and causes hundreds
of beaches to close each year, according to the Environmental Protection
Agency. A spill outside Austin three years ago contaminated the public
drinking water and led to an outbreak of a potentially fatal parasite.
In Northern Virginia, there were 842 spills between 1997 and May of this
year totaling more than 241 million gallons, according to the Virginia
Department of Environmental Quality. Maryland has had at least 2,340
spills since 1996, totaling almost 418 million gallons, according to
records at the Maryland Department of the Environment.
But the department admits those numbers are low because not all
utilities had been reporting spills. In October, the department told the
utilities they were required to report spills, and the numbers jumped.
In 1998, there were 171 reports of spills; through mid-July of this
year, there were 975.
Spills are so routine in Cumberland, Md., that officials were
surprised when the state told them last fall that they had to start
notifying the public.
"Everyone was saying, 'Oh my God, there were 55 million gallons spilled
into the north branch of the Potomac last year by the city of
Cumberland," said Jeff Repp, the city administrator. "But that has been
going on for years. . . . I guess people didn't think that in this
day and age this would happen. But it does."
Like the District, Cumberland's sewer system has just one pipe system
for both sewage and storm water. When it rains hard, there is more water
than the pipe system can handle. So it overflows. Officials don't always
know when there has been a spill, and other spills simply haven't been
reported to the public.
It took three days in September for health officials to warn the public
away from Colgate Creek, outside Baltimore, which runs into the
Chesapeake Bay, after 10.3 million gallons spilled into it. A spill in
Caroline County, Va., went undetected for a month. By the time officials
found the overflowing manhole, about 1.4 million gallons had spilled.
And WSSC officials suspect a spill they detected in the median of the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway lasted longer than that. A nearby resident
called the county health department to complain about a foul smell in
mid-September. When officials found a spill in the highway more than a
month later, they determined it had flowed into the Riverdale
neighborhood.
"It could have started with that first complaint," said WSSC
spokeswoman Liz Kalinowski. "Who knows?"
Upgrading Systems
At the urging of the EPA, some local governments have recently begun to
upgrade their systems and are looking for ways to cover the tremendous
costs.
The District recently announced plans to build three massive
underground reservoirs to catch sewage before it overflows. The project
is expected to take 20 years and cost $1 billion.
In Maryland, Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) recently formed a task force
to figure out how the state will find $1 billion to update the state's
sewer system. The General Assembly has begun to crack down, too, passing
a law requiring all spills be reported to the Maryland Department of the
Environment, which also developed guidelines on when to report spills to
the public.
Although Virginia has no statewide plan, several municipalities in
Northern Virginia are spending millions to expand treatment plants,
update pipes and better maintain the system.
Fairfax County spends $8 million to $10 million a year to line concrete
pipes with plastic to keep them from leaking, said Jimmie Jenkins, the
county's director of wastewater planning and monitoring. And it plans to
hire a consultant to help the county figure out how to reduce the number
of spills.
Arlington has spent about $6.2 million to build a tank to catch excess
sewage before it spills. Alexandria is spending $1.5 million to line
50-year-old concrete pipes with plastic and $320 million to expand its
wastewater treatment plant.
"We'll be able to handle much more flow," said Glenn Harvey, of the
Alexandria Sanitation Authority. "But will that be able to hold all the
runoff from the type of storm they had in D.C. last week? No. They got
clobbered."