Sewage Overflow: Billions of Gallons of Sewage Contaminate Lake Erie

2007-05-23

Executive Summary

More than thirty years after the Cuyahoga River was engulfed in flames and the Clean Water Act was passed to clean up America’s waterways, Ohio’s lakes, rivers, and streams continue to be plagued by pollution.

Lake Erie, arguably Ohio’s most important waterway continues to be threatened by pollution. Cherished by boaters, fishers, and families for its beaches, wildlife, and recreational uses, our Great Lake also provides drinking water to over eleven million people. While many different contaminants, ranging from mercury to PCBs, negatively impact Lake Erie, this report focuses on one major pollutant that we can eliminate: raw, untreated sewage. From January - December 2005, Lake Erie was flooded with more than 10.9 billion gallons of untreated sewage.

This report surveys how much sewage was dumped into the Lake Erie watershed basin from thirty-eight communities throughout 2005, while also looking critically at how our communities and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) are addressing sewage pollution and protection of public health. In conclusion, this report offers a range of solutions for eliminating sewage and protecting the public from this health threat.

The Problem

Combined sewer systems are designed to convey and attempt to treat sewage and rainwater. Combined sewer overflows (CSOs) are instances in which rainwater and untreated sewage overflow into our streams, lakes and rivers, including Lake Erie. Fifty-two communities within the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, ranging from small towns like Avon Lake, to the larger metropolitan cities including Toledo and Cleveland, have combined sewers and are plagued by CSOs. Together, these fifty-two communities have 598 combined sewer overflow outfalls, or pipes, that feed into waterways that lead into Lake Erie, or directly into the Lake itself.1 An analysis of thirty-eight of the fifty-two communities that dump untreated sewage shows that these communities dumped more than ten billion gallons of sewage into the Lake Erie watershed in 2005. This is equivalent to more than three billion toilets flushing into Lake Erie, - a drinking water source for more than 11 million people. Combined sewage overflows are a major cause of beach advisories, wildlife destruction, and human health problems.

Untreated sewage may contain disease-causing pathogens including E. Coli, Hepatitis A virus, and Giardia. Anyone who comes into contact with water that is contaminated with sewage is putting their health at risk. Sewage is also a likely contributor to the dead zone in Lake Erie’s central basin.

The Clean Water Act calls for the elimination of untreated or partially treated sewage releases into our waters. The law also requires that until sewage discharges are eliminated, sewage treatment facilities must monitor, report, and notify the public of all CSO events. Here in Ohio, sewage discharges are largely unmonitored and underreported to the OEPA. Although the OEPA has begun to require some communities to report sewage overflows on a monthly basis, there lacks a consistent statewide requirement. Therefore, neither the state agency, nor the public, is consistently aware of the billions of gallons of sewage overflowing into Lake Erie’s waterways. Without this information, the OEPA cannot achieve its goals of enforcing the Clean Water Act and eliminating pollution in our waterways. In the meantime, the public cannot adequately protect themselves from disease-causing pathogens found in untreated sewage.

Solutions

To eliminate sewage from entering our waterways and protect public health, the Environment Ohio Research and Policy Center recommends the following:

*      Communities need to incorporate technologies that help prevent excessive storm water from inundating our sewer systems. With more control over the storm water that enters our combined sewer systems, there will be less sewage overflowing into our waterways.

*      Our state and federal officials need to support more funding for sewage infrastructure improvements that strive toward the elimination of sewage overflows, such as the separation of sanitary sewer and storm sewer systems.

*      The OEPA needs to make reporting of any and all sewage discharges mandatory and consistent. The wastewater treatment facilities and the OEPA should notify the public in real time when these public health threats occur.

*      One promising development in the effort to stop sewage dumping is the Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes coalition and the US EPA-led Great Lakes Regional Collaborative. Both efforts are advocating federal support to fund a multi-billion dollar plan to restore the Great Lakes. The majority of this funding is allocated towards the “virtual elimination” of sewage dumping. The outcomes from this process will impact the future of eliminating sewage discharges into the Great Lakes.