Billions of Gallons of Raw Sewage

That's what the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District has dumped into Lake Michigan.

Metaphorically speaking, billions of gallons of raw sewage also refers to a significant portion of the content of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Case in point -- The article on the Sierra Legal Defense Fund's "Great Lakes Sewage Report Card."

I wrote about the report card in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning, "The Great Toilets." (What took The Journal Sentinel so long to get to the story?)

Naturally, The Journal Sentinel carries water for MMSD, gleefully reporting the findings that Milwaukee is not the worst polluter of the Great Lakes.

Milwaukee has long been painted by environmentalists as a villain for its chronic sewage spills into Lake Michigan, but a report released Wednesday by a Canadian conservation group shows the city is far from the worst polluter in the Great Lakes.

Milwaukee's grade of a C-plus, in fact, ranks in the top half of the 20 Great Lakes cities evaluated for their sewage management, and at the top of all the major cities surveyed, including Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto.

Still, nobody anywhere in the Great Lakes should be doing back flips, because the report prepared by Sierra Legal Defence Fund shows that an "appalling" amount of fouled water is gushing into the world's largest freshwater system, a drinking source for millions of people, including the Lake Michigan cities of Milwaukee and Chicago.

The 20 cities surveyed in the report alone dump an estimated 24 billion gallons of untreated sewage each year into the Great Lakes, "an outrageous quantity," said Jode Roberts, communications director for Sierra Legal.

"I knew it was a problem, but I had no idea how serious it was," added Elaine MacDonald, senior staff scientist for the group and author of the report.

But Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' deputy water administrator Bruce Baker was somewhat buoyed by the news. While he is dismayed by the volume of nasty stuff spilling into the lakes each year, he said he was happy the group took the time to put the problems of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District in perspective with other Great Lakes sewage spillers.

What a load!

The report declares the dumping of sewage to be "appalling."

Milwaukee only got a C+ grade.

That's not good news.

I guess relatively speaking one could consider it to be positive. It's sort of like being happy about someone committing only a few murders rather than killing hundreds of people.

He said the district still has a lot to do to curb its overflow problems, but it has been "singled out as this really bad actor when we've known all along that when you put them in the context of large cities on Great Lakes, they're certainly not the lowest on that list."

Since 1994, MMSD has dumped an average of more than 1 billion gallons of untreated sewage per year into Lake Michigan. Last-ranked Detroit dumped more than 13 billion gallons in 2002 alone, according to the report. That waste ultimately makes its way into Lake Erie.

Detroit is a worse offender than Milwaukee.

I DON'T CARE.

The Sierra Legal Defense Fund's report is not vindication for MMSD.

The city isn't the worst sewage dumper. So what?

That doesn't make the practice of pouring billions of gallons of raw sewage into the lake easier to swallow.

There is no good news here.