Whoops the US Sewage System

Emily Badger at The Atlantic—It's Not Just Overflow—Everyday Leaks from Sewer Systems Lead to Alarming Amounts of Sewage in Our Waterways:

Sewage runoff into our waterways is both an environmental and a political problem when we can see and smell it. If you live in an older U.S. city with a combined sewer system – one where storm water and sewage share the same pipe network, overflowing through the same outlets – you've probably had the visceral experience after a big storm of approaching a river with a musty sheen.

We know, though, that city sewage in some form finds its way into our rivers and bays even in good weather (and without as much noxious evidence).

"We know that the sewers leak," says Marion Divers, a Ph.D. candidate in geology and planetary science at the University of Pittsburgh. "But that's the thing – we really don’t know how much they leak. That was our big unknown."

What Divers and coauthors Emily Elliott and Daniel Bain found is that an estimated 12% of the sewage produced by the people living in their study area makes its way into Pittsburgh's Monongahela River "just from one tiny little watershed in the city of Pittsburgh."

Cities like Pittsburgh have had a hard enough time dealing with overruns from combined sewer systems (for which many of them are currently under consent decrees with the EPA). Back in 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country a D-minus for its handling of wastewater, citing aging systems that discharge billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into waterways each year. The latest edition of that report card is expected this week, and it's hard to imagine that our sewer systems are doing any better four years later, especially as researchers learn that they may be causing even more (less visible) harm than we thought.

"Even fixing the combined sewer system," Divers says, "taking all the combined sewer overflow discharges out of the water here in the city will not solve the problem of sewage getting into our waterways."

Swell.

Welp, good thing we've been doing all that hard work around the world smashing other countries to bits and then "nation-building" them back into worse shape than they were when we got there.