850 Bl. Gallons Of Untreated Wastewater Enters Nations Waterways Each Year

[hatrack]

"If you happen to visit Washington, D.C., on a rainy day and take a bathroom break during your tour of the Smithsonian or Lincoln Memorial, there’s a good chance that whatever you flush down the toilet will flow directly into the nearby Anacostia River. With a system designed at the turn of the 20th century, the District of Columbia’s sewers regularly overflow into nearby waters if as little as half an inch of rain hits the pavement. But the District is not the only metropolis battling poorly working sewers.

A U.S. EPA report sent to Congress in August finds that more than 772 combined sewer systems annually discharge around 850 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into nearby waterways; this is approximately twice as much drinking water as New York City uses every year. The agency estimates that these sewage overflows degrade water quality, shut down numerous beaches, and lead to about 3500–5500 gastrointestinal illnesses every year.

Combined sewer systems, like the ones in D.C., were built primarily in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions and contain pipes that carry both sewage and storm water. During heavy rain, the pipes overflow into rivers and onto beaches. Newark, N.J.’s sewers, which date back to 1852, are so old that they now grace the rolls of the National Register of Historic Places. But the data on sanitary sewers, which serve only a single purpose, are equally dismal. An EPA report in 2001 found about 40,000 sewage overflows into waterways and 400,000 backups into basements. Each overflow is a violation of the Clean Water Act. EPA estimates it will take $139.4 billion to fix all the nation’s leaky sewers.

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Recently, EPA has begun forcing cities to invest more money in their sewers. EPA settlements in Baltimore, Md., Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Ga., each came with price tags of more than $1 billion for repairs. The largest case was against Los Angeles, Calif., which has the world’s largest sewer system. For decades, Los Angeles had been spewing raw sewage into coastal waters. Now, after a lawsuit, the city has agreed to spend $2 billion during the next two decades to fund projects, including fixing the entire sewage system and revitalizing the Los Angeles River. If the city doesn’t meet the schedule for repairs, there will be penalties, says Tracy J. Egoscue, the executive director of Santa Monica Baykeeper, an environmental group. “I think the city finally means it, and they are going to start making changes,” she says. The lawsuit was the culmination of an 11-year effort by her group to force the city to upgrade sewer lines. The problem had become so bad that Los Angeles was forced to form an odor advisory task force because some neighborhoods smelled of raw sewage after backups. However, Egoscue says that the problem remains in surrounding cities. The same week the agreement was publicly announced, sewers in the nearby oceanside city of Huntington Beach overflowed and shut down beaches during tourist-heavy Labor Day weekend."

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http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2004/nov/policy/pt_sewage.html