In a small victory for clean water activists in Baltimore, the Maryland Department of the Environment has decided to halt the city’s practice of secretly dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Inner Harbor.
In an email on Friday, May 27, the state agency said it will require the Baltimore Department of Public Works to start following a state law that requires public notification for sewage discharges of more than 10,000 gallons. However, under a revised federal consent decree guiding $2 billion in upgrades to Baltimore's sewer system proposed on Wednesday (after this radio program aired), the city will have until 2022 to stop most of its sewage discharges into the Inner Harbor's main tributary, the Jones Falls. And overall, the city will have a 14 year extension -- until 2030 -- to complete all required repairs to its leaky sewer system, which were supposed to be finished by January 1, 2016.
David Flores, the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper, noted last week that the public reporting of sewage overflows is important. “There is no reason the city shouldn’t be sharing that data with the public. People need to know when there are millions of gallons – or tens of thousands of gallons of sewage – pouring into our waterways, especially downstream here on the Inner Harbor where we have folks boating and recreating pretty regularly,” Flores said.
This change in public reporting requirements -- and improved transparency by the city -- came because of this radio program’s investigation of the issue, with the Environmental Integrity Project, David Flores, and the Baltimore Brew news blog.
An investigative report about the problem, funded by the Abell Foundation, found that secret sewage dumping is a major source of contamination for the Inner Harbor. Levels of fecal bacteria in the harbor are sometimes 400 times what is safe for kayaking and people using paddle boats.
Federal and city records show that from December 1 through March 31, Baltimore intentionally dumped 38 million gallons of sewage into the harbor’s main tributary, the Jones Falls, but failed to issue the required public notifications to warn people more than two thirds of the time.
Over the previous five years before December, the city released 335 million gallons of sewage into the Jones Falls in 106 incidents, but notified the public only 3 percent of the time, records show.
The city also failed to report its sewage dumping into the Jones Falls to the Maryland Department of the Environment’s online public sewage overflow database, to which all other cities and counties are required to report.
The history of the problem is this: The city’s sewer system is more than a century old, and its pipes are leaky and overwhelmed. Since 2002, the city has been under a federal consent decree to upgrade the system and stop all sewage spills by January 1, 2016. The city had more than 14 years and a billion dollars to upgrade its system, but completed only about half of the required work by the deadline.
At about 2 pm on Wednesday, June 1 (after the recording of this radio program), the Maryland Department of the Environment and Environmental Protection Agency released a revised proposed federal consent decree that sets a new final deadline for the city of 2030 for work to upgrade the sewer system. As part of this, the city must have a new Emergency Response Plan that requires the city to notify the public about all large sewage discharges in the future.
In a written statement on Friday, Jay Apperson, spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment, or MDE, put this in more technical terms, saying: "We have told the City that they will have to revise their Emergency Response Plan and submit it to EPA and MDE for approval, and that the revision must include a description of how they will provide notice to the public of an unpermitted discharge from the collection system, including outfalls 67 and 72."
These are the two outfalls on the Jones Falls, upstream from the Inner Harbor at 1901 Falls Road and 428 E. Preston St., from which the city has been intentionally dumping releasing millions of gallons of sewage to relieve pressure on the overwhelmed pipe system during rains.
City officials say they have kept these relief pipes open because they discovered, during their upgrade work system, that a 12 foot sewage main was misaligned, and that this restriction was causing a continuous 10-mile backup of sewage under the city.
Without intentionally releasing some of sewage from the overwhelmed system during rain storms, city officials have argued, more sewage would back up into the basements of people’s homes.
Last month, the city signed a contract with a pair of companies to fix the pipeline restriction problem by the year 2022, which city officials estimate should stop more than 80 percent of the sewage discharges.
"The Baltimore City Department of Public Works is proud of the steps we are taking to improve our waterways,” the department’s director, Rudy Chow, wrote in a recent letter to The Sun. “Yes, we live in an era where we expect instant results, but fixing a 110-year-old system takes logical steps, extensive engineering and solid construction."
Because of the recent decision by MDE on public notification, Baltimore will now have to start publicly reporting its intentional sewage releases into the Jones Falls.
Although the 14 year extension for the sewer repair work is disappointing, the increased transparency and public reporting by the city will be good, because it will help put public pressure on the city to accelerate its much-delayed sewer upgrade work, and finally clean up its historic and economic heart, the Inner Harbor.
