Underground and on the air
Sewer dumps. Photo courtesy MMSD
The July 23rd Brew City Flood and heavy rains a week earlier led to two enormous dumps of…well, crap, into the lake — and unleashed another surge of crap from AM talkers.
Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling were beside themselves to find every euphemism they could in describing the total 2.1 billion gallons of storm water and sewage that spilled into the lake as Mayor Tom Barrett’s fault.
They berated the local newspaper for not mentioning Barrett in its coverage of the flooding, lampooned the mayor’s appearance at an environmental conference in the days after the deluge, and lambasted him for not fulfilling a 2004 campaign promise to overhaul MMSD.
Sykes and Belling also declared the deep sewer a failure and demanded that someone immediately call for the separation of the combined sewage and storm sewers throughout the sewage district.
This would laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
A young man died, hundreds of people lost millions in property and 19 homes near Lincoln Creek will probably be razed after their foundations were washed away in the surge of water.
Manhole geyser. Photo Flickr Creative Commons, Beige Alert
The fact is, it rained. And not just a summer rain, not a 100-year rain, but a rain of biblical proportions.
According to the National Weather Service, 8.98 inches of rain fell between July 22nd and 24th, and spread over the 411 square miles of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District that amounted to almost 63 billion gallons of water!
I looked and I couldn’t find a modern sewer and sewage system that could handle that amount of water. Maybe Sykes and Belling know something more than the officials at MMSD do (I highly doubt it), but there was no way this could have been avoided with the system currently in place.
Did the deep tunnel fail? No. The tunnel was never advertised to eliminate every overflow, but only to reduce the frequency and volume of them. It was advertised to reduce the number of overflows from 50-60 per year to an average 1.4 combined sewer overflows. It has not met that goal, instead averaging 2.6 per year, according to MMSD. In 2010, MMSD has had 4 lake overflows; the state permits 6 per year.
This issue really is a Catch-22. Taxpayers demanded a low cost solution to stop sewage from getting into our waterways. What we received was the deep tunnel. Adequate and doing what it should, but it doesn’t really go to the heart of the problem — old, inadequate sewer lines and combined sewage and stormwater lines, some more than 120 years old, that desperately need replacement and separation.
MMSD Deep Tunnel. Photo courtesy MMSD
According to MMSD’s 2020 Facilities Plan, the cost to separate the lines was estimated at $4 billion in 2007. And that didn’t include work beneath the streets of downtown Milwaukee, which is a knot of utility lines and antiquated systems.
As I listen to the demands for Tom Barrett’s head and for him to force MMSD to find an instant solution to the problem of combined sewers, storm water run-off and the loss of homes and materials in the flood, I think of the flip side.
When I asked Barrett at a recent budget hearing what he was going to do about the sewers, he could have answered that he was immediately taking bids to replace the hidden infrastructure, no matter the cost. That would have led to the explosion of heads on the AM dial, amid howls that he is wasting the taxpayers money.
Instead he took a more pragmatic approach, saying the city planned to work in the area most affected by the flooding and that he would lobby for federal dollars for the system as a whole.
Fix it and Barrett and MMSD are damned, don’t fix it and they’re still damned.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain anymore this summer.
Good article.
If you thought road construction was bad this year, imagine every street in the combined sewer area being torn up South 2nd Street style. Impossible to really even imagine that being pulled off. Separating the sewers just isn’t going to happen.
Oh, I know the separating of sewers isn’t going to happen. I just find the hypocrisy of the AM talkers crying about the imposition of the deep tunnel project, then turning around and demanding we separate the sewers for billions. You know they’ll bitch about the cash being spent or the poop being dumped either way. I wish at times they would just shut up.
Exactly. I just don’t think the general public seems through that issue.
Here are the facts on the deep tunnel as far as I know them:
– The deep tunnel cost the taxpayers 3 billion dollars to build
– The MMSD promised the deep tunnel would handle all but the 500 years storm before it was built
– For some reason which I do not know, it was built connected to the septic sewer. Whatever reason that was, it had to have been in MMSD’s original design, and therefore had to be taken into account.
– If the capacity of the deep tunnel is reached, there would be massive residential and commercial sewer backups. In an attempt to prevent this the deep tunnel is bypassed, dumping billions of gallons of septic sewage and rainwater into the lake. (although, there are still widespread sewer backups)
– The deep tunnel has not lived up to MMSD’s original promises, and has proven to not have been a good use of taxpayer money since it doesn’t come close to solving the problem it was created to solve
– MMSD is not held accountable for this failure
Did I get something wrong?
The issue of this storm we just had is a special one. It is correct to say no sewer system could handle a deluge like that, however a rainwater runoff only sewer could have bypassed and dumped billions of gallons of untreated rainwater into the lake. That’s much better than dumping rainwater + sewage like we have it now. A rainwater only solution probably would not have cost nearly as much as the deep tunnel, because it would not need the capacity. If we get a large storm, we bypass the rainwater into the lake, just like we do it now but without the sewage. There are less residential backups, because unless something is wrong, rainwater isn’t getting into the septic sewer.
Right now we have a very expensive solution that isn’t doing the job. We need to spend a lot of money to fix it. So the question is, do we fix it or just leave it broken?
Seems like when something fails miserably to live up to our expectations, the concern is suddenly vaulted into the spotlight for debate. For once it would be nice to take a proactive approach and discuss new designs and approaches to the problem whether basements are flooded or not. Most likely we’ll be talking about this next summer, and the next. Unfortunately, no matter how much we want this problem to go away, it won’t.
Nice article Patti!
Even if the sewers were separated that doesn’t insure the lake water would actually be cleaner, as in most cases we do want to treat runoff as it contains toxins and heavy metals.
I am encountering this article for the first time. I need to say that this piece is one of the more intelligent things that I have read on the topic. Most readers understand that mechanical things do not always function flawlessly–autos occasionally break down, furnaces need to be repaired or replaced, computers crash ona routine basis. MMSD is also a mechanical thing–pipes, pumps, turbines, etc., on a huge scale–and these things do not always work perfectly. The deep tunnel is a part of this system, it is large, it was expensive, and its total capacity of over 0.5 billion gallons seems like it should be able to handle anything that comes its way. But the fact is that a one-inch rainfall on Milwaukee County amounts to 7.1 billion gallons–or about 14 times the tunnel’s capacity. It’s true that all that liquid does not get into the tunnel immediately, but in a large and fast rainfall such as we just had its easy to see how the tunnel and treatment plants can be overwhelmed. Also, regardless of statements made back in the 90’s when the tunnel was being built, the tunnel was not designed to be able to completely handle the large storms (to do so would have cost billions more in dollars). But the fact is that before the tunnel was put into operation, there were 50-60 overflows a year into Lake Michigan, whereas today, with active and direct management by MMSD’s engineers, that number has been reduced substantially in terms of volume and occurrences (in 2011, there was one small overflow). The data is out there if you look for it with an open mind.