The river as sewer: the combined system and the federal case

THE DOCUMENTED COURSE TO THE CONSENT DECREE OF 2011

What the city stopped taking from the river, it spent a century putting back: South Bend's sewers were built combined — storm water and sanitary sewage in the same pipes, sized for dry weather. In wet weather the system relieved itself into the river at overflow points along its banks, by design. The scale of that design's failure is a federal figure: when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice announced their settlement with the city on 29 December 2011, the agencies stated that South Bend was discharging more than two billion gallons of untreated sewage into the St. Joseph River every year, in approximately eighty combined-sewer-overflow events. The number of the system's overflow points is printed two ways in the record and both stand: the city's own utilities briefing to its council in April 2012 counts thirty-six CSO locations; the university magazine's account of the same system counts thirty-five overflow points.

The receiving works stood at the river's edge: the city's wastewater treatment plant on Riverside Drive, a 1950s plant — the April 2012 briefing calls it "the 55 year old Wastewater Treatment Plant" — standing some 2,000 feet short of the northern city limits, discharging its treated effluent to the river under a state permit, with the river required to meet water-quality standards at the Michigan state line about 2.6 miles beyond the city. The settlement, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, bound the city to a long-term control plan then estimated at $509.5 million over twenty years, with completion set for 2031; the city had already invested or committed some $100 million since 2006 toward the problem, including plant expansion, sewer separations and storage, as its 2012 briefing to the council records.

The decree also reached the tributary: it required the Bowman Creek supplemental environmental project told above. Two billion gallons a year is the baseline from which everything in the next entry is measured; it is the agencies' figure, dated to their announcement, and no earlier CSO accounting of the city's was reached in the federal record — the pollution era's own total, across the century in which the combined system relieved itself uncounted, does not exist as a number and is not invented here.

Sources:

1. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Justice, "City of South Bend, Ind., to Reduce Raw Sewage Discharges" (29 December 2011) — more than two billion gallons of untreated sewage a year in approximately eighty overflow events; the $509.5 million long-term control plan over twenty years; the consent decree in the Northern District of Indiana; the Bowman Creek supplemental project.
2. City of South Bend, Department of Public Works, "City of South Bend Utilities" briefing to the Common Council (April 2012) — thirty-six CSO locations; the 55-year-old wastewater treatment plant; about $100 million invested or committed since 2006; the state-line water-quality point 2.6 miles from the city.
3. Notre Dame Magazine — the treatment plant's siting on Riverside Drive, some 2,000 feet shy of the city limits; thirty-five overflow points (printed against the city's thirty-six).