Patricia Houser
For Nature’s Sake
Patricia Houser
An American swimmer took probiotics for weeks ahead of time. A triathlete from the UK planned to take Pepto Bismol before and after her race. And Australia’s long-distance swimmers took antibiotics for a month before heading to Paris. All were Olympic athletes trying to avoid getting sick from immersion in a “notoriously polluted” Seine.
The river’s condition and athletes’ health were a subplot of this year’s Olympics, including headlines about the “dirty Seine” (USA Today) and “unsafe E. coli levels” (NPR). At the same time, we were hearing of Paris’s recent investments making the river swimmable, including references to something called combined sewer overflows.
To better understand what Paris is doing with the Seine, and the “win” they are going for in their struggle against this type of pollution, it may help to look at what is happening with CSOs closer to home. Across the US there are approximately 700 cities with river quality undermined by CSO pollution, including six cities in Connecticut: Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Norwalk, Norwich and Waterbury.
The term “combined sewer overflows” refers to what happens when anything from a few gallons up to hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater, mixed with untreated human waste, are diverted from underground pipes and flow out into a local river. It’s a failsafe measure intended to prevent the bursting of pipes that have become too full, especially after rainstorms. That overflow is part of an outmoded infrastructure design called combined sewer systems which can be more than 100 years old, according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Since each CSO represents a location where sewage can enter a river, generally the fewer CSOs a city has the better. Waterbury and Norwalk each have just one CSO while Bridgeport has 31 spots where sewage can flow into local waterways, New Haven has 30 CSOs, Hartford 38 and Norwich 13, according to the EPA online map of CSOs.
To find the volume of overflows at those spots at different times, the public can consult an online DEEP performance dashboard. A table on that site shows, for instance, that it rained 0.6 inches on four different days in Norwich between Aug. 4 and 11 this year, and the rain led to untreated sewer overflows into the Thames and Shetucket rivers totaling more than 300,000 gallons. In Bridgeport, 1.6 inches of rain fell in a single day on Aug. 6, which caused the outflow of almost 2 million gallons of sewage into the Pequonnock River. And there are more entries for just August around the state.
In a March livestream presentation for the Connecticut River Conservancy, River Steward Rhea Drozdenko summed up some of the health risks and ecosystem strains that come with sewage overflows. Still, said Drozdenko in a more recent conversation, she’d like people to know how much communities in the state have accomplished in working to implement solutions, sometimes investing “millions and billions.” Over the past 50 years the number of cities with CSOs has decreased, the number of CSOs per city has been reduced, and the volume of flows from certain CSOs is lower than ever.
“Obviously, there’s still a long way to go, but things have been getting better,” she said.
Drozdenko also pointed to a major project in Hartford with some similarities to the recently completed sewage diversion strategy in Paris. The new, massive, underground Austerlitz storage basin in Paris will prevent the outflow of 10 million gallons of rainwater into the Seine, comparable to the volume of 20 Olympic swimming pools.
In Hartford, the 200-foot deep South Hartford Conveyance and Storage Tunnel will be a rock tunnel four miles long and 18 feet wide when completed in 2026. It is designed to convey and temporarily store 41.5 million gallons of stormwater, reducing the waste load to the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound.
There are other successful innovations being applied in Connecticut and elsewhere around the country to reduce CSOs. That includes the kind of so-called green stormwater projects that Dr. Michael Dietz, director of the Connecticut Institute of Water Resources at UCONN, has worked on with various communities around the state for close to 20 years.
Dietz says when he speaks with a new community group, he likes to relate their work to a day at the beach: “When you take your kids to the beach in the summer, you don’t want to show up and find that the swimming area is closed. And that’s quite common because of the stormwater runoff that contains bacteria and the combined sewer overflows.”
Those green roofs and raingardens, permeable pavements, water barrels and more can significantly reduce the runoff that will can cause CSOs and downstream pollution.
“I’m always open and honest about it,” Dietz says. “I tell people, putting in one rain garden or one rain barrel is not going to fix the problem. But if lots more people start doing this across the state, across those small watersheds, towns, municipalities…it can make a difference.”
Alicea Charamut, executive director of the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut, applauds suggestions to reduce impervious surfaces. And like Dietz, Charamut looks to end-of-pipe waterways for motivation. Even while we expect clean water for washing dishes and more, says Charamut, we should also follow what happens to that water when it’s flushed or rinsed down drains because, at the end the day, that becomes part of the lakes and streams we fish and swim in and the rivers that are the centerpieces of our communities.
“It’s our water. It’s ours. It’s a place where we should be able to go every day, any day, and if it’s a hot day, we can just jump in and not worry about getting sick,” she says.
Climate change adds a new element of urgency to needed further improvements in our sewage systems, research suggests. At the same time, while tackling these things we can also enjoy some very real gains in the state’s water quality, including mostly swimmable and boatable rivers, according to both Drozdenko and Charamut.
In the meantime, when any of us might be looking to work the topic of sewage and CSOs into a conversation, we’ll always have Paris.
Patricia Houser, PhD, AICP is a freelance writer and researcher focused on environment and sustainability.