2 Billion Gallons of Untreated Human Waste

Were allowed to dump into Lake Michigan.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/99365209.html

Milwaukee has long had a problem of combined sanitary and storm sewers. The recent record rain storms have highlighted the problem...AGAIN.

9000 homes had RAW sewage backup into basements. The bulk of those homes...are in low income, predominantly African American neighborhoods.

Putting off repair was the norm thanks to lack of funding through the Bush years.

Thanks Republicans. You suck. Now the beaches have been closed and the Lake stinks like shit.

Cheap bastards.

Also eastern...SHorewood and Milwaukee are on combined sewers....this area...is full of rich people who live by the lake.

They have long not wanted to face torn up streets and lawns and rerouted traffic to repair the problem.

than 2 billions gallons of raw cesspool sewage released into nature.

The verdict is officially in.

Republicans = Shit.

Milwaukee has been run by Democrats pretty much completely ever since it has been run by socialists.

The OP is wrong: only a tiny fraction of what was dumped was human waste. Almost all of it was rainwater.

The deep tunnel project works well enough most of the time
(to the non local--the deep tunnel idea is to store the combined waste/storm water run off untill it
can be treated- when the tunnel is too full- bad stuff gets released)
Folks that i have talked to wonder if global climate change is bringing more rainfall into the area
and making the tunnel less than adequete.

But i agree

It is a mess

The problem is not really the deep tunnel, the problem is combined sewers. This is a failure of local politics. Let me explain.

In most cities, there is a sanitary sewer, which goes from sinks and toilets and drains to a treatment plan. Separate from that and completely disconnected is a storm sewer, which is usually much larger, and collects water from streets and parking lots and dumps it, untreated, in a river, pond, lake, or ocean.

In downtown Milwaukee and Shorewood, municipal sewers were installed at a relatively early time, due ironically to the forward-looking progressive German socialists in power at the time. However, these early systems had a significant design flaw: raw sewage and rainwater runoff use the *same* sewer lines.

Fast-forward to recent times. The proliferation of streets and parking lots has led to common problems during heavy rainfall: all the rain, flowing into the sanitary sewer, overwhelms the treatment facility and has to be dumped without treatment. There are two ideas for dealing with this problem: the first is to separate the sewer lines like most cities do, and the second is to build a huge holding facility to collect the rainwater and sewage during rainfall so that the treatment plant can get to it when it's not raining. They chose to build the deep tunnels.

Unfortunately, this was not the best solution because while it did decrease the frequency of dumping, it didn't help as much as anticipated because it did not increase the rate at which the treatment facility could process the sewage. Furthermore, it did not solve another serious problem: during *very* heavy rainfall, the combined sewers, being smaller than most storm drains, simply cannot drain the water fast enough, and back up through the sanitary lines into peoples' basements, sinks, and toilets. The deep tunnel doesn't help this problem *at all* - the water never has a chance to get to the tunnel because it can't even fit through the intake pipes. *That's* what caused most of the recent damage and suffering. Storm lines, even if the overflowed, would at least just flood the streets with rainwater, not back up into peoples' homes.

EDIT: Contra to the OP claims, though, what backed up into basements and what was dumped into the lake is not really "raw sewage" because it was almost entirely rainwater, with a little bit of sanitary sewage mixed in. It's not like when your drains are plugged and everything that backs up is what originally went down the drain.

So why didn't the city just separate the lines in the first place? Politics, and rather ugly ones. See, Milwaukee pushed to create a sewage district called MMSD that would operate the sewers for the entire metropolitan areas, including the relatively affluent suburbs, and the Milwaukee mayor appoints a majority of the board. The problem is, separating the sewer lines specifically in Milwaukee and Shorewood would not be *system* upgrades, but rather local ones, which means that those cities would have to pay for it themselves. On the other hand, the Deep Tunnel, being a *system* improvement, could spread the financial burden across the entire district. As a result, they chose to do the Deep Tunnel, hoping that Milwaukee and Shorewood could avoid having to pay to separate their own lines.

Unfortunately, it didn't work as well they'd hoped it would, and now we're having to pay the price for their lack of vision.

I had never heard of combined sewers. Must have been pretty early that most cities realized that seperate systems are more efficient.

And ironically, local environmentalists have long opposed sewer separation, because street runoff itself can be highly polluted, and in the combined system that all gets sent through the treatment plant.

Of course, the resultant massive sewage dumps might have changed some minds, I don't know.

EDIT: The best solution would probably be to have separated sewers, but still route the storm sewers to the treatment plant, with copious bypasses to local waterways for when amount of runoff is too high for the tunnels to cope with.

That was my first thought. Kinda the best of both worlds.

The "sewer socialists" emphasized social democracy and civic improvements over social theory and revolutionary Marxism, in many ways ahead of its time. If not for the World Wars and the consequent loss of German political clout, our history might have been very different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_Socialism

EDIT: I just want to add that it wasn't just anti-German sentiment that doomed the movement, but the fragmenting of the socialist party. It was a real pity, as the midwestern socialists were quite practical. They weren't anti-business - in fact Milwaukee was a manufacturing giant - and they weren't much for redistribution, but they did work, honestly and openly, to make sure that some of those profits were channeled into real civic and social improvements that benefited everybody (as opposed to political cronies, graft, and pork projects.) And thanks to a relatively happy and healthy workforce, there were plenty of jobs and enough profit that taxes didn't even have to be that high. They were an example that I think todays Democrats could learn a lot from.

Where I grew up in Maryland if it rained hard the sewage would back up through the shower in the basement. If the storm was bad, the toilet would overflow and the laundry tubs might fill up because the shower and toilet didn't let enough gush out.

Happy days, those.

My parents' response within a year of moving into their new house (they had it built and were the first occupants) was to put a sewer shutoff valve in so that the basement toilet, shower, and laundry tubs were on the house side of the valve and the public sewer system was on the outside side of the valve. This kept the basement dry and shit-free even if it also meant we couldn't use the downstairs bathroom or the laundry room drains.

On the other hand, it also meant that the kitchen couldn't be used. Fortunately the upstairs bathroom's drain emptied past the cutoff valve.

This was really annoying during hurricanes. One time the valve was closed for over 3 days. Really nasty going out for a burger during a hurricane.

got 9" rain in 90 minutes with that storm.

After one of the dumping events in 2003...nasty stuff....

If this weather pattern continues next summer...I am rethinking living here.

We have had monsoons not just rain through June and July.

that shit flows south and is a huge health problem. the more this climate around here warms up the worse the problem is going to be.

I wonder what letting the very foundation of society crumble from neglect might accomplish?
:eyes:
:kick: & R

:scared:

:)

About the attendees, more specifically.

Probably not a group you want to see in their bathing suits...

Yuk.