Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways - NY Times
(David P.)
Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways
By Charles Duhigg: Nov 22, 2009
It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight
shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant,
where much of Brooklyn’s sewage is treated. A few miles away,
people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners.
But at Owls Head, a swimming pool’s worth of sewage & waste-
water was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to
blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls
Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the
intake gates. That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn’s
sewers, & untreated feces & industrial waste started spilling
from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and
Gowanus Canal. “It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,”
said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s engineers. “Sometimes all
it takes is 20 minutes of rain, & you’ve got overflows across
Brooklyn.”
One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the
nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century
ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of
rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress
distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that
what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates
would not endanger human health. But despite those upgrades,
many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according
to a NY Times analysis of environmental data. As a result,
sewage is spilling into waterways. In the last three years
alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems —
including those in major cities — have reported violating the
law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste,
chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes
and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental
agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency. But fewer
than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever
fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators,
the Times analysis shows.
It is not clear whether the sewage systems that have not
reported such dumping are doing any better, because data on
overflows and spillage are often incomplete. As cities have
grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infra-
structure projects & paved over green spaces that once absorbed
rainwater. That has contributed to sewage backups into more
than 400,000 basements and spills into thousands of streets,
according to data collected by state and federal officials.
Sometimes, waste has overflowed just upstream from drinking
water intake points or near public beaches. There is no
national record-keeping of how many illnesses are caused by
sewage spills. But academic research suggests that as many as
20 million people each year become ill from drinking water
containing bacteria and other pathogens that are often spread
by untreated waste.
A 2007 study published in the journal Pediatrics, focusing on
one Milwaukee hospital, indicated that the number of children
suffering from serious diarrhea rose whenever local sewers
overflowed. Another study, published in 2008 in the Archives
of Environmental and Occupational Health, estimated that as
many as 4 million people become sick each year in California
from swimming in waters containing the kind of pollution often
linked to untreated sewage. Around New York City, samples
collected at dozens of beaches or piers have detected the types
of bacteria and other pollutants tied to sewage overflows.
Though the city’s drinking water comes from upstate reservoirs,
environmentalists say untreated excrement and other waste in
the city’s waterways pose serious health risks.
A Deluge of Sewage
“After the storm, the sewage flowed down the street faster
than we could move out of the way and filled my house with
over a foot of muck,” said Laura Serrano, whose Bay Shore NY
home was damaged in 2005 by a sewer overflow. Ms. Serrano,
who says she contracted viral meningitis because of exposure
to the sewage, has filed suit against Suffolk Co., which runs
the sewer system. The county’s lawyer disputes responsibility
for the damage and injuries. “I had to move out, and no one
will buy my house because the sewage was absorbed into the
walls,” Ms. Serrano said. “I can still smell it sometimes.”
When a sewage system overflows or a treatment plant dumps
untreated waste, it is often breaking the law. Today, sewage
systems are the nation’s most frequent violators of the Clean
Water Act. More than a third of all sewer systems — including
those in San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Philly,
San Jose and San Francisco — have violated environmental laws
since 2006, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. data.
Thousands of other sewage systems operated by smaller cities,
colleges, mobile home parks & companies have also broken the
law. But few of the violators are ever punished. The E.P.A.,
in a statement, said that officials agreed that overflows
posed a “significant environmental and human health problem,
and significantly reducing or eliminating such overflows has
been a priority for E.P.A. enforcement since the mid-1990s.”
In the last year, E.P.A. settlements with sewer systems in
Hampton Roads, Va., & the east San Francisco Bay have led to
more than $200 mill spent on new systems to reduce pollution,
the agency said. In October, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P.
Jackson, said she was overhauling how the Clean Water Act is
enforced. But widespread problems still remain. “The E.P.A.
would rather look the other way than crack down on cities,
since punishing municipalities can cause political problems,”
said Craig Michaels of Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy
group. “But without enforcement and fines, this problem will
never end.” Plant operators and regulators, for their part,
say that fines would simply divert money from stretched budgets
and that they are doing the best they can with aging systems
and overwhelmed pipes.
New York, for example, was one of the first major cities to
build a large sewer system, starting construction in 1849.
Many of those pipes — constructed of hand-laid brick and
ceramic tiles — are still used. Today, the city’s 7,400 miles
of sewer pipes operate almost entirely by gravity, unlike in
other cities that use large pumps. NY City’s 14 wastewater
treatment plants, which handle 1.3 bill. gal. of wastewater
a day, have been flooded with thousands of pickles (after a
factory dumped its stock), vast flows of discarded chicken
heads and large pieces of lumber. When a toilet flushes in
the West Village in Manhattan, the waste runs north six miles
through gradually descending pipes to a plant at 137th St.,
where it is mixed with so-called biological digesters that
consume dangerous pathogens. The wastewater is then mixed
with chlorine and sent into the Hudson River.
Fragile System
But New York’s system — like those in hundreds of other
cities — combines rainwater runoff with sewage. Over the
last three decades, as thousands of acres of trees, bushes
and other vegetation in New York have been paved over, the
land’s ability to absorb rain has declined significantly.
When treatment plants are swamped, excess spills from 490
overflow pipes throughout the city’s five boroughs. When the
sky is clear, Owls Head can handle the sewage from more than
750,000 people. But the balance is so delicate that Mr.
Connaughton & his colleagues must be constantly ready for
rain. They pick cable TV packages for their homes based on
which company offers the best local weather forecasts. They
know meteorologists by the sound of their voices. When the
leaves begin to fall each autumn, clogging sewer grates and
pipes, Mr. Connaughton sometimes has trouble sleeping.
“I went to Hawaii with my wife, and the whole time I was
flipping to the Weather Channel, seeing if it was raining in
New York,” he said.
New York’s sewage system overflows essentially every other
time it rains. Reducing such overflows is a priority, city
officials say. But eradicating the problem would cost billions.
Officials have spent approximately $35 billion over 3 decades
improving the quality of the waters surrounding the city and
have improved systems to capture & store rainwater & sewage,
bringing down the frequency & volume of overflows, the city’s
Department of Environmental Protection wrote in a statement.
“Water quality in New York City has improved dramatically in
the last century, and particularly in the last two decades,”
officials wrote. Several years ago, city officials estimated
that it would cost at least $58 bill to prevent all overflows.
“Even an expenditure of that magnitude would not result in
every part of a river or bay surrounding the city achieving
water quality that is suitable for swimming,” the department
wrote. “It would, however, increase the average N.Y.C. water
and sewer bill by 80 percent.”
The E.P.A., concerned about the risks of overflowing sewers,
issued a national framework in 1994 to control overflows,
including making sure that pipes are designed so they do not
easily become plugged by debris and warning the public when
overflows occur. In '00, Congress amended the Clean Water Act
to crack down on overflows. But in hundreds of places, sewer
systems remain out of compliance with that framework or the
Clean Water Act, which regulates most pollution discharges to
waterways. And the burdens on sewer systems are growing as
cities become larger and, in some areas, rainstorms become
more frequent and fierce. New York’s system, for instance,
was designed to accommodate a so-called five-year storm — a
rainfall so extreme that it is expected to occur, on average,
only twice a decade. But in 2007 alone, the city experienced
three 25-year storms, according to city officials — storms so
strong they would be expected only four times each century.
“When you get five inches of rain in 30 minutes, it’s like
Thanksgiving Day traffic on a two-lane bridge in the sewer
pipes,” said James Roberts, deputy commissioner of the city’s
Department of Environmental Protection.
Government’s Response
To combat these shifts, some cities are encouraging sewer-
friendly development. New York, for instance, has instituted
zoning laws requiring new parking lots to include landscaped
areas to absorb rainwater, established a tax credit for roofs
with absorbent vegetation and begun to use millions of dollars
for environmentally friendly infrastructure projects. Philly
has announced it will spend $1.6 billion over 20 years to
build rain gardens and sidewalks of porous pavement and to
plant thousands of trees. But unless cities require private
developers to build in ways that minimize runoff, the volume
of rain flowing into sewers is likely to grow, environmental-
ists say. The only real solution, say many lawmakers and
water advocates, is extensive new spending on sewer systems
largely ignored for decades. As much as $400 billion in extra
spending is needed over the next decade to fix the nation’s
sewer infrastructure, according to estimates by the E.P.A. &
the Government Accountability Office.
Legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill contains
millions in water infrastructure grants, and the stimulus
bill passed this year set aside $6 billion to improve sewers
& other water systems. But that money's only a small fraction
of what is needed, officials say. And over the last 2 decades,
federal money for such programs has fallen by 70%, according
to the New York State Dept of Environmental Conservation,
which estimates that a quarter of the state’s sewage and
wastewater treatment plants are “using outmoded, inadequate
technology.” “The public has no clue how important these
sewage plants are,” said Mr. Connaughton of the Brooklyn site.
“Waterborne disease was the scourge of mankind for centuries.
These plants stopped that. We’re doing everything we can to
clean as much sewage as possible, but sometimes, that isn’t
enough.”
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