Pittsburgh has serious water problems. According to the Regional Water Management Task force, every year Southwestern Pennsylvania’s sewage system releases enough raw sewage into our groundwater to fill Heinz Field one hundred times. Southwestern Pennsylvania’s rivers, streams, and groundwater are so polluted that they are routinely in violation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations for contamination. In the summer of 2008, the rivers of Allegheny County contained levels of fecal matter so high that they were too dangerous for human contact by the Health Department on 47.5 days. If that sounds bad, consider the fact that in 2004 the number of unsafe days reached 125.  Such events peak during major, and not-so-major rain events, leading to huge damage – such as catastrophic flooding in Carnegie and Millvale during Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and the flooding of the entire business district of the city of Aliquippa during a heavy thunderstorm in 2007.

Water was once a natural advantage for the Pittsburgh area, with access to abundant rivers and streams, and reliable rain providing transportation and adequate drinking water to the region. Through decades of mismanagement, it is now a liability, manifested in the substandard quality of water used by residents. Regional growth is stifled by tap-in restrictions that prevent new economic development from connecting to its already over-capacity sewer systems. Waterfront re-investment efforts are stifled by red flag days and perceptions of our filthy rivers.

The water issues that Pittsburgh must deal with are in some ways symptoms of greater ailments that face the region. Pittsburgh’s infrastructure, nearly a century old in some places, is not adequately maintained and was not designed to handle the volume of water it must now convey. Meanwhile, governance in the region is so fragmented that eight hundred public entities over eleven counties are responsible for managing our regional watershed; yet, the watershed knows no boundaries. Municipalities that improperly dispose of waste upstream can ruin the work of communities downstream to maintain clean water.

If effective solutions are to be reached, these disparate municipalities and public authorities are going to have to work together, and citizens are going to have to get personally interested and involved in the safety of our water. New leadership is starting to emerge on the state and federal levels to assist local efforts for collaboration and finding physical and structural solutions to these complicated problems. Moving forward, the stakes are high and there are big challenges for the region, but new technology promises new possibilities. Decision makers can look to the success of other regions in dealing with sewer issues.

A History of Sludge: 150 of Sewers in Southwestern Pennsylvania

Until the late 1880s, sewage ran in Pittsburgh’s streets or percolated into its soil via septic tanks, leading to widespread outbreaks of diseases like cholera, as well as  endemic flooding. As the urban scene flourished, local municipalities devised systems to carry this sewage away from residential and commercial areas, dumping it directly into the three rivers.

In the early 20th Century, heavy industry and the booming population of Southwestern Pennsylvania led to significant degradation of the rivers. Sewage systems remained localized, with each municipality operating its own system of local pipes that emptied into a convenient river or tributary. Recognizing the urgent need for environmental remediation, regional leaders organized ALCOSAN, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, in 1946. ALCOSAN built large “interceptor” pipes to catch flow that had previously been  dumped into the rivers. ALCOSAN intercepted the flow from the local pipes and carried all the flow to a treatment center down the Ohio River. Starting in 1959 all sewage from the City of Pittsburgh and 82 other municipalities went there to be treated before being finally emptied into the Ohio.

Although the development of the sewage treatment plant helped to significantly reduce pollution, even relatively small amounts of rain still cause the systems to overflow and empty untreated into waterways. According to a report by the University of Pittsburgh Regional Water Task Force, as little as one-tenth of an inch of rain - the average daily precipitation in Pittsburgh - can cause raw sewage to overflow into our rivers and streams. The system’s sensitivity to wet weather is heightened by the deterioration of the pipes and manholes, now sometimes more than 100 years old, that allow in increased ground water and runoff.

Know Your Sewer CSOs & SSOs

Local sewer systems are still controlled by the municipal governments. As a result the Pittsburgh region has some variation in sewer systems with consequences for how they effect the environment.

Southwestern Pennsylvania’s first municipal engineers designed local sewers to collect all wastewater and convey it through a single pipe that emptied first into a convenient local river or tributary, later into the ALCOSAN system. That means that “sanitary” waste that comes from plumbing systems and storm water drains on city streets flowed together. Fundamental to these systems are overflow points designed to prevent backup into basements and damage to treatment equipment. These overflow points, known as Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) have obvious negative effects on water quality, dumping storm and household waste into public spaces. Environmental regulators frown on these systems but allow them where the cost of their replacement would be too great for the local community to bear. Of the total number of CSOs that are nationally permitted, Pennsylvania has the most, and more than half of those are in Southwestern PA — 755 as of 2001.

Some local municipalities have newer sewer systems collect waste from residential, industrial, and commercial locations and funnel sewer waste separately from storm water. Federal regulations prohibit sanitary streams from being designed with overflow points, but locally many have them anyway because they were built before the law took effect. The separated storm water pipes sometimes empty into local streams and the sanitary pipes go to the treatment facility. When storm pipes have no designated overflow points, they can be overwhelmed during major storms and snow melts, at which point they back up into basements and at manholes, dumping raw sewage into buildings and streets.

Sometimes rooftop gutters are illegally connected to sanitary sewer pipes. The connection may have been made decades ago, and current residents may have no idea. The introduction of rooftop run-off into sanitary systems is a significant cause of overflow. Disrepair and deterioration contribute to overflows. According to the Regional Water Taskforce report, 660 Sanitary Sewer Overflows (SSOs) occur in our region every year, releasing raw sewage undiluted by storm water.

EPA Citations and the Modern Era of Activism

In 1997, the EPA citied fifty of the municipalities in the ALCOSAN service area as well as ALCOSAN itself for sewage overflows that violated the Clean Water Act and levied  a staggering $275 million dollars in fines. The expenditures necessary to actually fix the problems run much more than that - an even more shocking $10 billion for the region.

To address this predicament, ALCOSAN, in partnership with the Allegheny County Health Department, created the 3 Rivers Wet Weather Demonstration Project (3RWW) to encourage communications and collaborative solutions for the region’s sewer crisis. Today, 3 Rivers Wet Weather is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping ALCOSAN and its clients address their overflow problems with cost-effective, sustainable solutions. 3RWW worked with agencies and municipalities to design and build consensus around a Municipal Consent Order. The Consent Orders require that each of the 83 ALCOSAN municipalities accomplish a specific set of tasks in an agreed-upon time frame.

First Steps Toward Solutions: Mapping and Monitoring

The first step in 3RWW’s action plan involved mapping and monitoring the flow in the thousands of miles of pipes that service the area. Collaboration on these action items was absolutely necessary to keep costs down. The mapping initiative, which lasted from 2003 to 2005, was budgeted at $2 million and was paid for by a grant from the state. As a testament to the importance of regional cooperation, if each municipality had done its mapping separately, the total bill might have been $10 million or higher.

Researchers cross-referenced centuries-old municipal plans with recently updated maps using the latest Geographic Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies. Additionally, workers had to manually locate many of the system’s 90,000 manholes in order to create useful models.

As of winter 2008 the newly-mapped system is being monitored for flow and repair status. Closed circuit television cameras are floating through every mile of the pipe, looking for deteriorated or disintegrated pipe walls, blockages, and unmapped tap-ins. The cameras can also determine the volume of water in the pipes at different times of day and after different-grade weather events. Using the rainfall gauges system designed by the National Weather Service, ALCOSAN can now determine the need for additional capacity in each area. These fact-finding initiatives are ongoing and scheduled for completion over the next few years.

Once these projects are complete and engineers have reliable and thorough data to work from, they can begin enumerating priority trouble spots and setting limits on ALCOSAN intake from each municipality. At that point they will consider many new ideas about water management in the search for the right balance between traditional infrastructure maintenance and development, and innovative environmental solutions.

Currently, ALCOSAN charges consumers based on the amount of water they use in their home plumbing systems. While this amount of water contributes to the work that needs to be done at the filtration plant, it is not an appropriate basis upon which to calculate billing. Many other factors within the control of the property owner contribute to overflow such as property surface run-off characteristics, particularly in CSO areas where stormwater mixes directly with sewage.

Lessons from Portland

The city of Portland, Oregon faced many of the same problems that the Pittsburgh region faces. In order to raise money to fund local water improvement projects, Portland developed a storm water utility fee that charged residents based on the area of impervious surfaces (roofs, driveways, parking lots) on their property that contribute to run off. The tax went into effect in 1977. When residents receive a bill from the authority based on their impervious surface area, they are given suggestions on how to reduce it by planting trees, using environmentally-friendly paving techniques, and cultivating rooftop gardens. The city provides storm water solution trainings and then provides tax credits for those who implement green technologies. Many suggest that such a system could work well in our area, increasing much-needed funding and encouraging green building.

Regional Problem, Regional Solution

The ALCOSAN area encompasses 83 municipalities. The greater Southwestern Pennsylvania watershed contains eight hundred public entities including counties, municipalities, and water authorities. Fragmentation has long been a barrier to effective governance in the area, contributing to inefficient duplication of service, arbitrary curtailment of local economic development projects by municipal boundaries, and impediments to regional communication and collaboration. Solving these problems is as monumental a task as solving the region’s water problem.

The University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics (IOP) has taken on the task of creating a forum for leaders from the government, utilities, businesses, and environmental groups to come together and plan for consensus and solutions to both issues. The Task Force Board, headed by Carnegie Mellon University President Jared Cohon, has proposed the creation of a regional water governing body that would use dedicated funding streams and decision-making authority to prioritize repairs and implement sustainable solutions.

The IOP’s proposal was a collaborative, iterative process involving many divergent stakeholders. Years of communication and trust-building laid the foundation for dozens of meetings with local governments to educate them on the issues and listen to their feedback.

The fate of the proposed regional water authority lies with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission (SPC), the Pittsburgh region’s 10-county regional planning body that works on economic development and infrastructure issues. The SPC’s approval, and an act of the state legislature, would be necessary to create such a board. Negotiations are ongoing, and hopefully will soon generate complete results.

Within the ALCOSAN area, this proposed board’s authority would resembles some functions of the proposed merger of the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County governments. Perhaps the relatively urgent needs of water infrastructure will influence the ongoing dialogue concerning a potential City-County merger in the area, long a topic of conversation among public sector reformers.

Leadership From Above

In Pennsylvania, municipalities are creatures of the state and exist at its pleasure. Any changes that they wish to make to their governing structure require an act of the legislature. The creation of a regional water authority would similarly require significant cooperation from Harrisburg. The large amount of capital necessary for such an endeavor would also need to come from the state government. Statewide, experts have estimated the bill for fixing all deteriorated water systems could reach $113.6 billion over the next 20 years.

In November 2008, Pennsylvania voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum incurring $400 million in public debt to fund grants and loans to localities for “acquisition, construction, improvement, expansion, extension, repair or rehabilitation of drinking water system, storm water and nonpoint source projects, nutrient credits and wastewater treatment system projects.” This money will be governed by the regulations set out in Act 64 of 2008, which outlines the restrictions on grants and loans based on the size, population, and income of municipalities.

The state efforts to improve water quality will be guided by the newly created Governor’s Sustainable Water Infrastructure Task Force, a 30-member board of business, government, and community leaders brought together to gather and analyze information on water issues and make recommendations on the most just and cost effective ways to tackle the problems. The mandate from this referendum and creation of the task force may be an effort on the part of Governor Rendell, whose term ends in 2009, to set the agenda for the next administration and to make sure that water quality issues are at the forefront.

Environmental and infrastructure issues could be coming back en vogue in the national public dialogue as well. President-elect Barack Obama plans to create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank (NIRB) endowed with $60 billion over 10 years. The NIRB will provide financing for infrastructure projects nationwide. Obama points to the development of infrastructure as a worthy endeavor as an economic development and national security imperative. Since his election, observers have compared him to President Franklin Roosevelt whose New Deal initiatives helped to relieve Depression-era unemployment through public works projects – public works projects that created many of the sewer systems we still use today.

Conclusion

The water issues in Southwestern Pennsylvania are serious and have been well documented by organizations such as the Regional Water Management Taskforce and 3 Rivers Wet Weather. Sewage overflow creates real environmental problems that affect the health of our waterways, wildlife, and ecosystems. The health of citizens who recreate on or near the water or sometimes who simply drink from the tap are jeopardized by the current state of affairs.

The Pittsburgh region’s water could be a huge asset for economic development, providing leisure, transportation, and aesthetic appeal. Pittsburgh could be capitalizing on the fact that water here is so abundant and available for use in industry, while other areas of the country like Los Angeles and Phoenix are facing water shortages. Cleaning up Pittsburgh’s water supply is a safety issue, a public imperative, and a smart business move. If municipalities can work together to create meaningful organizations that can work with the state and federal government to solve these problems, Pittsburgh can reap these benefits - but it will not be an easy task.

Laura Meixell can be reached at ljm22@pitt.edu