Milwaukee Riverkeeper's Executive Director Karen Schapiro was recently published in an Op-Ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel regarding MMSD's most recent combined storm water and wastewater overflows into Lake Michigan.

While July 22nd's rain-fall was too much for any city's sewage district to handle, Milwaukee Riverkeeper believes more should be done to alleviate the dumping, which occurs on a frequent basis.

[excerpted from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

By all accounts, the downpour of July 22 was of biblical proportion. As a result of the torrential rains, the sewerage system was overwhelmed and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District discharged more than 2 billion gallons of combined storm water and wastewater into Lake Michigan and area rivers. In addition, an estimated 10,000 residents and businesses were assaulted by flooding and sewage backups, posing damage to property and risk to health.

As catastrophic as the downpour was, it provides us with yet another opportunity to take stock of MMSD's efforts to eliminate or reduce the flow of sewage into our lakes, rivers and basements. An examination of what MMSD is doing right and where it may have fallen short is in order.

At the outset, MMSD should not be blamed for what took place July 22. While some may charge that the sewerage system is undersized or mismanaged, that does not appear to be the case. The system is not designed to handle storms of this magnitude - and no one should expect that it could accommodate all such extreme weather events.

In fact, the damage would likely have been far worse had not certain improvements been made by MMSD in the past several decades. Take for example the deep tunnel, a $3 billion system of tunnels burrowed beneath the city. The deep tunnel can store up to 520 million gallons of storm water and wastewater, while treatment proceeds at the two MMSD treatment plants. Prior to the deep tunnel coming online in 1993, nearly every rainfall meant a sewage overflow. While people still debate whether the deep tunnel is performing as intended, the frequency and volumes of overflows have been reduced significantly since operations commenced.

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