The Great Toilets

The Great Lakes aren't really toilets. We just treat them that way.

Today, the Sierra Legal Defense Fund released its Great Lakes Sewage Report Card.

The grades are somewhat disappointing.

Surprised?

Read the report here.

It's a massive work.

The Associated Press sums up the key findings.

TORONTO -- The untreated urban sewage and effluents that flow into the Great Lakes each year are threatening a critical ecosystem that supplies water to millions of people, according to a study by a Canadian environmental group.

Even though municipalities in the Great Lakes region have spent vast sums of money in recent decades upgrading their wastewater plants, the situation remains appalling, said the Sierra Legal Defense Fund.

Sierra Legal said in a report to be formally released Wednesday that it studied 20 Canadian and American cities, analyzing municipal sewage treatment and discharges into the Great Lakes basin, the Canadian Press news agency reported on the report Tuesday, saying it received an advance copy.

The survey graded municipalities in areas such as collection, treatment and disposal of sewage based on information provided by the local governments.

The main problem, the environmental group said, is that in many cases, antiquated sewage systems are incapable of dealing effectively with the vast amounts of effluent that flow through them.

The situation is especially bad when heavy rains overwhelm treatment systems in cities where storm run-off is collected in the same pipes as sewage.

Some 24 billion gallons of untreated effluent enter the Great Lakes every year through combined sewage overflows, the study found.

Even with a relatively minor rain event, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District dumps untreated sewage into Lake Michigan. Sometimes, it's not completely untreated. It's what MMSD calls a "blend."

When the rain is especially heavy, MMSD's "Lake Michigan solution" can be especially jaw dropping in scale.

For example, from the June 8, 2oo4 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Rained a lot; not our fault.

That, in a nutshell, was the defense sewerage district officials offered Monday for the record 4.6 billion gallons of raw sewage that was dumped into local streams and Lake Michigan last month.

Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District officials told the state regulators that the rains through much of May were so heavy and local sewer lines so leaky that MMSD's system just couldn't handle all the flow. Dumping was done legally as an alternative to causing basement backups, MMSD officials said.

Astonishingly, the report gives Milwaukee (p. 50) a grade of C+.

That's scary. If Milwaukee can pull a C+, how bad does a city have to be to get a lower grade?

Green Bay (p. 49) can be proud with its B+ performance.

...Canada's worst offender was Windsor, Ontario, which _ along with U.S. cities Detroit and Cleveland _ performed "abysmally." Cities such as Toronto and Hamilton also earned below-average grades.

At the top end, Peel Region just west of Toronto, Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota, were the best performers, thanks largely to their ability to keep rain water and sewage separate.

So Wisconsin is among the best performers in the country because it manages to keep rain and sewage apart.

That's amazing.

Also from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

On Tuesday, two environmental groups notified the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District that they intend to file a second lawsuit against the district in federal court in Milwaukee in an attempt to halt ongoing sanitary sewer overflows.

In March 2002, Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers in Milwaukee and Alliance for the Great Lakes in Chicago, formerly the Lake Michigan Federation, filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking a cessation of sanitary sewer overflows and asking a federal judge to impose financial penalties against the district for violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

The lawsuit alleged the dumping of more than 900 million gallons of untreated sewage from sanitary sewers into Milwaukee rivers and Lake Michigan from 1994 to January 2002.

Who knew that a city with a history of dumping BILLIONS of gallons of untreated sewage into Lake Michigan was worthy of a C+ grade?

More proof of grade inflation I guess.