Sewer Problems Overwhelm City and State Maintenance Officials MARYLAND AND WASHINGTON, DC (wypr) - From Baltimore to Cumberland, from the Washington suburbs to Cambridge, sewer system operators are under state and federal orders to stop the spills that have damaged Chesapeake Bay tributaries over the years. But the costs are overwhelming. In this installment of "Drip, Drip, Drip: The Crisis That's Out of Sight and Out of Mind," WYPR's Joel McCord looks at how those operators are coping.

The pumps in Baltimore's oldest sewage pumping station have just kicked on. They're giving the sewage that has flowed down pipes that follow the Jones Fall to this spot a few blocks from the Inner Harbor one last push to the Back River Sewage Treatment Plant.

The station at Eastern Avenue and President Street, built in 1912, is undergoing a major renovation. That includes new pumps, valves, electrical wiring and a huge back-up generator to keep things flowing smoothly just in case the electricity goes out. MaryAnn Tana, the project manager, says it's imperative to avoid accidents here.

"And what we need to do is, in order to do that, we have to improve the processing portion of it. So it will process the sewage properly and not have any problems that could ruin the harbor. This is our jewel. We can't have anything happen down here."

The challenge, she says, is this station is still in operation.

"We have to keep it operational at all times. We can't interrupt the operations of the pumping station. And we have to, as we're doing one particular pump, we have to make sure all the other ones are working properly because we can't go without a pump or two."

These upgrades aren't part of the agreement the city reached with state and federal agencies in 2002, but they only make sense. If you're going to fix all fourteen hundred miles of crumbling terra cotta sewer pipes, you better make sure all the pumps are working properly as well.

The agreement requires the city to upgrade six other pumping stations, eliminate valves that allowed sewage overflows into nearby streams, carefully inspect all the sewer pipes and fix the problems by 2016; all at a cost of nearly a billion dollars.

Mayor Sheila Dixon said city officials pointed to their falling tax base and asked the federal government for help, but were told, "You figure it out."

"The only way we could figure it out was by increasing water and sewer charges to our constituents, to residents, businesses. And so, systematically over the last, what now, since 2000, 2001, we've had generally, with the exception of maybe a year annual increases."

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission is responsible for 53-hundred miles of sewer pipes in Prince Georges and Montgomery counties. It is under a similar federal order as well. And, like Baltimore, has raised water and sewer fees to pay for the work.

Teresa Daniell, who was serving as interim general manager, said utility agencies need a sustainable fund to handle this kind of work.

"But even if there were some sort of fund set up by the federal government, by the state, by whomever, that funding comes from tax payers. It comes from the people that use the service, that use the product."

The biggest problem in Baltimore's system is what they call "I and I", infiltration and inflow; sewage doesn't leak out of the pipes so much as ground water seeps in. Wazir Qadri, the acting chief of water and wastewater, says that during heavy rains the additional water is more than the pipes can handle.

"It's not damaging the pipe, but I think it's just taking the capacity and it's coming out from the manholes then we don't have the capacity and overflow occurs basically."

At one time, sewer engineers had the solution to that. They engineered relief valves in the system that allowed that excess sewage to flow into nearby streams. John Martin, who runs the Back River sewer plant, says it seemed like a good idea at the time.

"It was all there to, for the most part, to try to prevent sanitary sewage from flowing out of, bubbling up out of manholes and out on the street because now you're dealing with a major health issue and we were trying to avoid that."

But the nutrients in that raw sewage pouring into Chesapeake Bay tributaries form the basis for the algae blooms that create dead zones. And it's still a public health problem. Part of the agreement involved closing off those valves.

The city, which has spent 330 million dollars so far, has closed off all but two of those structures. But that's created a problem at the Patapsco and Back River plants, which now get almost double the amount of water they normally would have during a storm. Martin says much of what sewer plant operators do is based on the flow into their plants.

"Our chemical additions have to change and all this kind of stuff. All this all has to change anyway from day to night, but that's a fairly predictable change. And then when you add 50 percent or 100 percent more flow in terms of rain water, now you've just, everything is out the window."

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission has the same problems with extraneous water seeping into aging sewer pipes and leading to overflows that threaten public health and the health of bay tributaries. But there's another one as well: the fats, oils and grease poured down the drains of homes and restaurants all over the densely populated region.

"Hardens, it gets real hard, almost like a rock. And that's a major issue with WSSC."

Calvin Farr is a group leader for the commission's waste water collection operation. The agency has spent four years searching for weak points in its sewer system and is laying plans for repairs.

On this day, he is with a crew that is replacing a section of a lateral in a Silver Spring subdivision with pipes that will be easier to monitor and maintain.

"We're going to be doing a lot of sewer rehab in the next, probably the next, four or five years; in the 80 to a hundred mile a year range. So we're going to be doing a lot of construction."

The commission's Teresa Daniell says they can extend the useful life of some of their pipes by rehabilitating them rather than replacing them and by doing some preventive maintenance that involves their customers.

"We can work with the communities and really with the communities to eliminate or at least greatly decrease the amount of fats and oils and grease that go into the pipes because that's the number one cause of sewer pipe blockages and then overflows."

And that sounds a lot cheaper than digging up the streets in two counties to replace pipes that might have a little life in them if somebody took better care of them.
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