The Big Necessity by Rose George Read Free Book Online Page A

separate sewer system (SSS). The second does not. A combined sewer system (CSS) puts water from all sources—street, bathroom, and anywhere else—into the same pipes. It is cheaper and easier to construct, which is why New York’s sewer designers probably chose it. But it has one powerfully weak spot: rain.
    Sewer designers try to plan for excessive rainfall by installing storm tanks at points along the system and as emergency reservoirs at wastewater treatment plants. When more rain than expected falls, it can be held safely and the sewers will not flood. But a tenth of an inch of rain, falling in a short space of time, can overwhelm the tanks. Then, the system does what it’s designed to do in such circumstances: it discharges raw, untreated sewage into the nearest body of water. Such discharges are called CSOs (combined sewer overflows), and they are far commoner than most people think. In New York, according to the environmental group Riverkeeper, there is generally one CSO a week, and the average weekly polluted discharge is about 500 million gallons, an amount that would fill 2,175 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Nationwide, according to the EPA, the wastewater industry discharges 1.46 trillion gallons—I can’t conceive how many swimming pools that is—into the country’s waterways and oceans.
    â€œLook,” says Kevin Buckley. “It’s either discharge or it comes up in people’s basements.” Buckley, the happy Irishman who has organized the traffic-stopping exercise in Queens, has taken me over the road to see the nearby outfall into Jamaica Bay. We watch a crab tootling between the floating barriers that are supposed to direct wet weather discharge into the bay, next to a sign that tells people to call 311, New York’s nonemergency hotline, if they see sewage pouring out in dryweather. “That’s a no-no,” says Buckley. Wet weather discharge is normal. It’s how the system works, whether people know it or not. Sewer designers calculate their system capacity to cope with storms and floods. New York’s sewers, built in drier, less globally warmed times, were built to cope with a maximum of 1.75 inches of rain falling in an hour. But times and the weather have changed. Buckley only has anecdotes to back him up, but he swears storms are getting more frequent and more intense.
    On August 8, 2007, 3.5 inches of rain fell in two hours in Manhattan, and 4.26 inches in Brooklyn. The subway system failed: this was more water than their pumps could cope with, and the tracks were flooded. The Metropolitan Transport Authority blamed the DEP, saying it couldn’t discharge the water because the sewers were already full; the DEP blamed the MTA. In fact, as then-governor Eliot Spitzer said, neither was really to blame, because “we have a design issue that we need to think about.” In its report
Swimming in Sewage
, the Natural Resources Defense Council expressed exasperation that “the nation at the forefront of the information age has about as clear a view of the quantity of sewage that leaks, spills, and backs up each year as we do of the sewage pipes buried beneath our feet.” When a catastrophic overflow happened in London in 2004, and 600,000 tons of raw sewage poured into the Thames, people did notice. Fish died in the hundreds. Newspapers called it “The Lesser Stink.” The newly formed Rowers Against Thames Sewage (RATS) organized a rowing event on the same stretch of river that hosts the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. The Turd Race saw two boats—Gashaz and Biohaz—tow giant inflatable feces for half a mile, with the rowers all clad in gas masks. Biohaz stormed to victory. A parliamentary inquiry expressed “abhorrence at this legitimized pollution and the depressing attitude with which it is accepted,” and eventually, after fifteen years of procrastination, the government approved plans for a £2 billion