Thirteen years ago, the federal government sued Baltimore because its leaky sewer system was releasing so much raw sewage into the Inner Harbor and Chesapeake Bay it was violating the federal Clean Water Act.
To settle that lawsuit, then-Mayor Martin O’Malley signed a consent decree that required the city to fix the problem and eliminate all sewage overflows by January 1, 2016.
The city more than tripled water and sewer bills for city residents in part to pay for the repairs and collected more than a billion dollars. But with only about two weeks left before the deadline, the city is only about half done with the work required, and sewage overflows continue at a rate that is averaging more than one a day, with a total of 42 million gallons just this year.
In fact, Baltimore continues to deliberately pipe tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage mixed with rainwater into the Inner Harbor’s main tributary from outfalls on the Jones Falls that EPA ordered the city to close more than five years ago, according to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project.
The two sewage system relief pipes on the Jones Falls dumped about 335 million gallons into the waterway in 119 incidents over the last five years, with about 97 percent of these overflows not reported to the public as required by state law, according to city and state records.
That means the city intentionally released about 15 times more raw sewage into its waterways from 2011-2015 than the 22 million gallons it reported to the public through press releases (as required by law) or the publicly-accessible Maryland Department of the Environment sewage overflow database.
Dana Cooper, chief of legal and regulatory affairs at the Baltimore Department of Public Works, said the city is making progress in repairing and upgrading its sewer system – with $700 million spent so far replacing or lining 163 miles of pipes.
But Cooper said the city cannot yet close these two last open sewage outfalls because the system is so overwhelmed during rain storms that closing the relief pipes would cause more flooding of homes than is already happening.
“When our system was designed 100 years ago, water quality and surface water quality was not what the system was designed for,” Cooper said. “It was designed to get the sewage away from the people, and get it to the plant. And if you can’t get it to the plant, just get it away from the people. And the water quality in the rivers in the early 1900s wasn’t the purpose of this. So we are fighting against the way the system was originally designed.”
Cooper said that before the city can close these two relief pipes the city will have to spend at least another $350 million fixing a massive sewerline restriction problem at the entrance to the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant.
One result of the city’s continued piping of sewage into the Jones Falls is that fecal bacteria levels in the Inner Harbor continue to exceed safe levels for kayaking or paddle boats at least a third of the time, according to city data.
There is also this major issue: More than 400 residents have also filed damage complaints with the city over the last three years because sewage from the city’s overwhelmed system has overflowed into their basements.
Doris Brightful, a 79-year-old retired nurse from the Grove Park neighborhood of Northwest Baltimore, recalled how a sewage flood in September wrecked her basement furniture, hot water heater and photo albums in September.
“As heavy as that manhole cover is, it just pushed it straight up in the air and the water just came,” Brightful said. “And by it being a health hazard, you know we couldn’t come down here because of the materials, you know. We couldn’t step in that. By me being a nurse, I told my husband, ‘No, you cannot go down there.’ We just had to wait it out. But by the time we waited it out, everything in our basement is destroyed.”
Because Baltimore has not yet fixed its sewage problems, the city is now negotiating with EPA and the state, asking for a new deadline to fix the problem perhaps a decade into the future. The organization I work for, the Environmental Integrity Project, wrote a letter to EPA on behalf of Brightful and her neighbors.
We are urging the authorities not to allow the city unlimited time to repair its system – with a new deadline of no later than 2020 – because homeowners like Doris Brightful are living in fear of the next sewage flood.
To read the Environmental Integrity Project report, visit: www.environmentalintegrity.org
