Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
USA Today
Copyright 2002
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
NEWS
Sewage pouring into lakes, streams ; Outdated systems in several cities send
waste into the water. Solutions are costly, but so is inaction, and some fear
the government is moving too slow.
Tom Vanden Brook
Nation
SSO 700 is an unremarkable spot. Just a pipe, hidden by trees and
brush, emptying into Mill Creek near downtown Cincinnati.
"It just gushes, even in dry weather," says Mike Fremont,
president of the Ohio environmental group Rivers Unlimited. "If you
know what it is, you keep your distance."
What it is, is human waste -- hundreds of gallons of it at a time
flowing untreated from toilets into the creek. Sanitary Sewer
Overflow 700 is not only disgusting, it is illegal. But the city
won't shut it off because plugging SSO 700 and more than 100 pipes
like it all over Cincinnati would require raising sewer rates about
1,500%.
"It would bankrupt us," says Patrick Karney, director of the
Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati. "It would be,
last one out, turn out the lights. Cincinnati would just be another
wide spot on I-75."
Dozens of cities like Cincinnati, some with sewer pipes laid in
the 1800s, are dumping raw human waste into streams and lakes. The
practice is generally illegal under the 1972 Clean Water Act. Yet it
continues an estimated 40,000 times every year because cities balk
at the enormous expense of modernizing and expanding their sewage
systems.
But if taking care of the problem is costly, so, too, is doing
nothing, environmental activists say. Raw sewage in the water is a
primary factor in the sickening of 1 million people a year,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It
poisons shellfish, closes beaches and endangers supplies of drinking
water.
"Raw sewage is a health concern," says Mike Cook, director of
wastewater management for the Environmental Protection Agency.
"Beach contamination is a concern. Human exposure to harmful
microorganisms is a concern."
After decades of threats and fines, federal authorities are
cracking down:
* In Baltimore, city officials agreed to pay a $600,000 fine and
spend $940 million over 14 years to upgrade its sewer system. Since
1996, Baltimore dumped at least 100 million gallons of untreated
waste into its waters. Some of the sewage spewed into tributaries of
the Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation's top sources of shellfish.
* In Baton Rouge, local officials plan to spend as much as $461
million to improve their sewer system to avoid dumping 1.2 billion
gallons of untreated waste each year into the Mississippi River.
* In Greenwich, Conn., a million gallons of inadequately treated
sewage has been dumped into local waters, according to the EPA.
Local officials agreed in January to pay a $285,000 fine and upgrade
the sewage treatment system.
The Justice Department and the EPA have taken other cities to
court over sewer problems, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala.,
Honolulu, Los Angeles and Miami. Regulators expect to be done this
fall crafting proposed regulations requiring all sewage treatment
facilities in the country to improve their systems and notify the
community where overflows occur.
White House hurdle
But the proposal will then face another hurdle: It must be
submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The
office reviews such rules to determine their costs and benefits as
well as the science that backs them, says Trent Duffy, a spokesman
for the office.
The office has 90 days to pass judgment on proposed rules and has
not hesitated to send rules back to agencies for changes. From July
2001 to March 2002, it returned for reconsideration more than 20
rules, more than the total returned during the entire Clinton
administration.
Environmentalists say the government has already taken too long
to fix the problem.
"We urge you to put the interests of the American public first
and to move forward with rules that will at least warn our citizens
before they take a dip in fecal-contaminated waters," stated a
recent letter from 11 environmental groups to the EPA.
The groups called on the EPA to immediately adopt rules proposed
by a federal advisory committee in 1999 that would require
monitoring for sewer overflows and reporting them to public health
authorities.
But not everybody says new rules are the answer. Ken Kirk,
executive director of the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage
Agencies, says the Clean Water Act fails to consider the limits of
engineering.
"There is no way to design sanitary sewers to accommodate a zero-
tolerance policy. Period," Kirk says.
In some cities, including Baltimore and Baton Rouge, pipes may be
100 years old or older. They break and crack, releasing waste, or
become clogged by tree roots. Often the pipes are too small to
handle the growth in city populations.
Sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) typically occur when rainwater
seeps into broken sewer pipes and fills them past capacity.
Treatment plants can't handle the rush of water and sewage, so
overflow valves like SSO 700 in Cincinnati open up and let the
disease-carrying waste spill out. Some overflows are inevitable,
Cook says. Heavy rainfall can overwhelm even well designed and
maintained systems. But the numbers today indicate that sewage
planners have not kept up with population growth.
"It could be that sewer capacity is exceeded by population
growth," Cook says. "In some cases, they've hooked up more people
than the system can handle."
The health effects of this lack of planning are significant.
Bacteria, viruses and parasites, common in human waste, can
infect shellfish, swimmers and drinking water. They cause diseases
such as cholera, hepatitis and meningitis. Contamination of this
kind is estimated to kill 900 people and sicken nearly 1 million
every year, the CDC says.
Not all of these cases can be traced directly to sewage. Animal
waste contains dangerous microorganisms, too. But most
environmentalists argue that human waste is the greatest danger to
people.
"Trouble is, the same virus can have very different symptoms,"
says Chuck Gerba, a University of Arizona professor of microbiology. "I may get
a rash, you may get a fever, another guy may get a cold.
Good old ankle-grabbing diarrhea is common, too."
Illnesses and pollution
Getting a handle on the problem is a challenge.
One study found that as many as 1,400 cases of illness from
contaminated shellfish go unreported each year. Last year, a survey
by the EPA of about 2,400 beaches showed that more than 600 issued
swimming advisories or closed because of poor water quality. In 2%
of the cases, local officials attributed actions to sanitary sewer
overflows. Environmentalists say the percentage is probably much
higher.
"This is a problem that's getting worse and isn't being properly
addressed," says Nancy Stoner, director of the clean water project
for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Sewage overflows occur
in every city. These pipes are out of sight, out of mind."
Representatives of treatment plant operators contend that heavy
rain or melted snow make sewer overflows a part of life. They say
trying to eliminate overflows entirely would cost ratepayers
billions of dollars and make negligible improvements in water
quality.
Better maintenance of sewers and eliminating the worst overflow
sites should be the thrust of any new EPA rule, says Greg Schaner,
director of governmental affairs for the Association of Metropolitan
Sewerage Agencies.
Some communities have gotten a handle on the problem without new
regulations. Fairfax County, Va., had video camera crews seek out
deteriorated pipes and focused on keeping tree roots and grease
clogs out of the system. That helped reduce its SSOs from 128 in
1995 to 48 in 2001.
Cities facing bills to fix faulty sewers at an estimated cost of
$10 billion a year in total say zero tolerance will bankrupt them.
And they say it's unfair to expect city residents -- many in poor
neighborhoods -- to pay the whole bill.
"There should be some cost sharing with the federal government,"
Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley says. "A clean bay is a great goal,
but the manner in which they're forcing us to pay for it is totally
unfair and not right."
Under pressure from the EPA, Cincinnati's sewer district has
agreed to spend $43 million to eliminate 17 of its worst overflows.
The deal will keep 100 million gallons of raw sewage from being
dumped into waterways each year.
Plugging all of Cincinnati's estimated 100 SSOs could cost $3.6
billion, Karney says. Even if he had 15 years to do it, ratepayers
would still see annual bills jump from $320 to $5,100 based on the
average bill for winter water usage. That's an increase of almost
1,500%.
"These Johnny-come-lately regulations weren't anticipated in the
1800s when these systems were built," he says. "There was no eye to
the environment in those days. You can't miraculously redo 3,000
miles of sewer. It takes time."
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Overflows by the numbers
The Environmental Protection Agency says the number of sanitary
sewer overflows each year nationwide is unknown. In some areas,
overflows might not be reported or are underreported to the EPA and
state environmental agencies.
Even so, there are some estimates:
* The EPA says there are at least 40,000 sanitary sewer overflows
each year. That figure does not include sewer backups in basements.
* An EPA survey last year of 2,445 beaches in the USA found that
672, or 27%, issued advisories or closed at least once because of
bad water quality. Elevated bacteria levels were responsible for 87%
of the closings or advisories. More than half of the incidents had
an unknown cause. Survey respondents said sanitary sewer overflows
were to blame in 2% of the cases. Other sewer and septic problems
accounted for 11% of the cases.
* A survey of 79 members of the Association of Metropolitan
Sewerage Agencies in 1994, the latest data available, showed that
65% of the respondents reported overflows during wet weather. They
reported that as much as 35% of their sewers were filled above
capacity and/or overflowed during wet weather.
* The EPA estimates it would cost as much as $10 billion per year
to add capacity, repair and renovate. The agency says the nation's
sewer infrastructure is worth $2 trillion.
The environmental group Sierra Club estimates it costs homeowners
$600 million each year to clean basements fouled by backed-up
sewers.
TEXT WITHIN GRAPHIC BEGINS HERE
When it rains, it flows
Sanitary sewers are pipes that carry waste from toilets to
treatment plants, where it is broken down with filters and
disinfectants and released relatively clean into waterways. How
heavy rain affects sanitary sewer overflow:
(illustration comparing dry weather flow vs. heavy rain flow)
TABULAR OR GRAPHIC MATERIAL SET FORTH IN THIS DOCUMENT IS NOT DISPLAYABLE