The Environmental Protection Agency wants to relax sewage discharge rules. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports, there’s disagreement about what impact those changes would have on water quality:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to relax sewage discharge rules. As the Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports, there’s disagreement about what impact those changes
would have on water quality:
The change would make legal a practice that’s already common at many wastewater treatment
plants. Partially-treated sewage is released when plants get overloaded, during heavy rains, for
example. The wastewater is blended with cleaner water, disinfected, and discharged.
Officials with the EPA say “blending” is a safe way for plants to avoid sewage backups in
people’s homes.
But Laurel O’Sullivan of the Lake Michigan Federation says the policy could have severe
consequences for public health in the Great Lakes region, where many sewer systems are old and
in need of more capacity.
“And the blending policy basically gives a pass to these sewer systems, in terms of trying to have
to upgrade their system’s capacity.”
O’Sullivan says the policy could result in a repeat of incidents such as a 1993 sewer overflow in
Milwaukee. The city’s water supply was contaminated by a parasite that killed more than a hundred
people.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Sarah Hulett.