An environmental watchdog group says the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District has dumped one billion gallons of raw waste into Lake Michigan over the past eight years. Now it’s taking its case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jenny Lawton reports:
Transcript
An environmental watchdog group says the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District has
dumped 1-billion gallons of raw waste into Lake Michigan over the past 8 years. Now it’s taking
it’s case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jenny
Lawton reports:
The Chicago-based Lake Michigan Federation says bacterial waste released from Milwaukee
continues to threaten Lake Michigan’s beaches.
The problem stems from Milwaukee’s underground sewage system…which isn’t big enough to
accomodate the city’s waste.
The Sewerage District has plans to upgrade the system by 2010.
But the Federation says that’s not soon enough.
Executive director Cameron Davis wants the Court to force the sewerage district to make the
changes by imposing fines.
“As long as there aren’t financial incentives to do that, what we’re going to see is kind of this
incremental, small step to small step approach sewage overflows in the region. And that’s simply
not acceptable.”
But last month, a Milwaukee federal district court dismissed a similar lawsuit… saying state
agencies had enforced the laws diligently.
Now the Federation hopes to prove to the U.S. Court of Appeals that Milwaukee has racked up
over 100 federal Clean Water Act violations in the past few years.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jenny Lawton.