C'mon Milwaukee, Let's Clean Up Our Town

[43north87west]

Originally Posted by Milwaukee Ronnie

The Deep Tunnel has had an impact. We used to see 60-plus spills per year. Now we see 1 to 2 per year. The Milwaukee River is far cleaner than it used to be, fish species are repopulating, and there even blue heron and other waterfowl species living in the River now. If you look at other Great Lakes cities, Milwaukee dumps a fraction of what they do, so much so that other cities are now building their own Deep Tunnel systems.

Do we want to see zero sewerage emissions? Of course. But thus far modern engineering has not devised a way to make that possible. The dirty little secret of every single city that is built on a waterfront is this: when it rains a lot, **** ends up in the water. It ends up in the water through one of two ways: in cities with combined sewerage systems (storm and sanitary together) it happens when rain waters from the storm sewers overwhelm the system, making the system run out of room to store the stuff for treatment. Hence the Deep Tunnel to help store the overflow.

The other way **** ends up in the water is in cities with seperated systems, where the storm sewers flow right into the waterways, untreated (Minneapolis has such a system). When it rains a lot, all of the junk in people's yards, the streets and the rooftops ends up in the water. After a heavy rain, for instance, you can literally see the poo and other nasty things chugging right into Lake Mendota in Madison.

So what's the solution? The Deep Tunnel has helped by allowing Milwaukee's combined system a place to store overflows. If we doubled the capacity of the system, which would cost untold billions of dollars, we could get those 1 to 2 spills a year down to maybe 1 spill every 2 years. There is is o way a system could entirely eliminate spills, unless you built one with such awe-inspiring storage capacity it cost a trillion dollars to build.

What's interesting is that if you look at other cities, spills are so commonplace that they don't even make the news. They happen all the time, so they're not newsworthy. Here in Milwaukee, since the Deep Tunnel was such a costly project, and since spills are now relatively rare, they make big news when they happen. So, ironically, Milwaukeeans' perception is that the problem is worse here than in other places, because we hear about it, whereas our friends in, say, Cleveland, don't. It is also quite ironic that since the Deep Tunnel has done it's job, and has made spills far rarer than in the past, our perception of the problem is worse, and therefore we think the project was a "failure," and we're reluctant to sink more money into to expand it, therefore making spills even rarer. Ironic indeed.

ALmost twenty years ago, I wouldn't swim in Lake Michigan. When I left four years ago, I swam at leisure (several miles offshore, but it still used to be nasty out there too). Near shore is still nasty but that's because of birds and weed growth. The water is clear almost all of the time not far offshore, when it used to be brackish and nasty. Zebra mussels have helped, but there is not much sewage. When there is, it's very obvious.

That said, I still think the project was waaaay overpriced but that is another story altogether.

[Milwaukee Ronnie]

Interesting you bring up zebra mussels. The zebra mussels make the water clearer, but they also make the beaches stink later in the summers. They overconsume the phytoplankton, which leads to clearer water. Note that in the last ten years, Lake Michigan appears almost Carribean-like, it's so blue. The trouble is that that phytoplankton dine on algae. With less phytoplankton, you get overpopulation of algae. The aglae then collect in huge plumes, wash up on shore, and then die in the sunlight. The dead algae stinks. So what some people take for the smell of sewage is actually the smell of dead algae. The fact is, Lake Michigan is literally cleaner than it has been in any of our lifetimes. But it's an ecosystem totally out of wack. It wasn't output from the cities that did it. It was invasive species that entered the Lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaway.

[karfar]

Yes, the algae blooms are a culprit but so is sewage

[javaman]

I just got back from 2 weeks out of town. The streets in my neighborhood still look like a bad road in an abandoned gravel pit. Milwaukee Ronnie's 'fleet of street sweepers' must still be out at sea. Having lived her for over 50 years, it seems the only things the city seems to do with any real regularity is pick up my garbage and collect my property taxes.