Sewer overflow problems widespread
Posted on November 24th, 2009
Greenwire: A rainfall in late October sent a rising tide of industrial waste and untreated feces surging 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 of the engineers at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant in Brooklyn. “Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you’ve got overflows across Brooklyn.”
The plant’s inability to deal with increasing levels of runoff of rainwater and waste is part of a more wide-scale trend, according to an analysis by the New York Times. Though the Clean Water Act aimed to help upgrade the nation’s sewer systems and respond to population increases, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems have reported illegally using local water sources and other areas as dumping grounds for untreated or partially treated feces, chemicals and other hazardous materials in the past three years.
But fewer than one in five of these cases led to fines or other governmental sanctions, according to the Times. To help address the problems, some communities have supported sewer-friendly development such as zoning laws for parking lots that include green spaces to absorb rainwater, but environmentalists say such solutions are only temporary. And estimates indicate that illnesses associated with exposure to the runoff may number as high as 20 million. Last month, U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson announced she was overhauling how the Clean Water Act is enforced.
Fixing the nation’s sewer problems would cost as much as $400 billion over the next decade, according to estimates by EPA and the Government Accountability Office (Charles Duhigg, New York Times, Nov. 23) – DFM