Science Friday - How Aging Water Systems Are Pushing Sewage Into U.S. Homes

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Walter Byrd remembers the first time sewage came bubbling out of his toilet like it was yesterday.“It was just pumping up through there,” Byrd says. “One of the bathrooms was so full of waste, at least 4 inches high in there. It smelled just like a hog pen.”He sopped up the murky, foul-smelling water and doused the floor with bleach. But the sewage kept coming. On rainy days, it overflowed from drainage ditches into his yard, carrying wads of toilet paper and human waste.The eight-bedroom home in Cahokia Heights, Illinois, had been a source of pride for Byrd when he first built it in 1996. He spent a lot of time outside, caring for his vegetable garden and watching wildlife wander through the backyard. But trying to stop the sewage backups quickly became his main focus, consuming countless hours and thousands of dollars of his savings.“It was a dream house, until the floods came,” says Byrd, now 67. “That house broke me down.”Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Aging water systems in the U.S. are pushing sewage into people's homes. One of the bathroom was full, so full of waste, at least about four inches high. I tried everything, and you can still smell that. Smell in that house. It's Monday, October 28th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Deep Peter Schmidt. We've been hearing about a lot of national issues heading up to Election Day, but wastewater hasn't really been one of them, despite a sewage crisis in many American cities.

There are nearly a million miles of pipes that we flush our toilets into, and they're starting to break down, sending raw sewage into people's homes. Here's Science Fridays, John Dankoski, with more. Here to talk with us about this is Shayla Farson. She's a science journalist and editor with American public media. Shayla, it's great to have you back. Thanks for having me. Okay, so we've got sewage ending up where it shouldn't be. Take us to some places where this is happening.

Yeah, I mean, sewage backups are pretty common in the U.S., so they happen everywhere from, you know, Massachusetts. to Iowa to South Dakota. But one place that's been really struggling with these backups for years is a small city in southern Illinois called Cahokia Heights, about a 10-minute drive from downtown St. Louis. And just for context, most of the residents there are black and about 40 percent live in poverty. And that's where I met Walter Bird. Walthor's in his late 60s. And back in 1996, he built what he calls his dream house. I like the area. because it was like a lot of wildlife around there, right? rabbits, squirrels, everything was there.

And it was wonderful. You might find some deer in the yard in the morning. They'd just be looking at you, you know? So, yeah, it was real nice. And then I had my garden and all this stuff. I had squash. I had corn. I had peppers.

I had, oh, man, I had a real nice garden. So the house itself had eight bedrooms, a master bath for him and his wife with a big whirlpool tub. It was basically everything Walter wanted. And then things kind of started falling apart. Oh, boy. So what happened? So along the road to Walter's house are these drainage ditches. I mean, they're essentially trenches.

And he discovered that when it rained, these ditches would fill up with water and flood his yard. So he bought a pump to try to keep the floodwater away from his house. But then water started showing up inside his house, and it wasn't floodwater this time. It was sewer water, and it was coming up through the toilet. Here's Walter. One of the bathroom was so full of waste, at least about four inches high.

Toilip paper and waste bagged up back up in there. And when I got the door open, the door seemed like the door swelled up a little bit. I tried everything, and you can still smell that smell in that house. He said it smelled like a hog pen. This happened again and again, and it wasn't just Walter's house. He figured out his neighbors also had sewage coming up into their homes, out of basement drains, you know, bubbling up out of toilets and bathtubs. And in some cases, when the water finally went down, you'd have inches of this thick, black, smelly sludge left behind. Oh, it sounds terrible, but it also sounds like it's a pretty serious health problem.

Oh, definitely. I mean, Rasuage is full of all different kinds of things that can make us sick. Bacteria, viruses, parasites. Teresa Gildner is an assistant professor of biological anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. And her research team has found people in Cahokia Heights are infected with different parasites that spread through sewage, like tapeworms. Plus, up to 43 percent of residents they've tested have had this specific bacteria that infects the stomach lining. It's usually asymptomatic, but it can make people pretty sick. Here's Teresa.

So it can cause things like gastritis as kind of like inflammation in the gut that can be really painful. It might cause malnutrition. You know, if you're having a lot of pain, maybe you're not eating as much or the way you're digesting food is different. And as kids, that could cause growth delays. So it can have these long-term consequences. It has been linked with things like stomach ulcers and even certain types of cancers in very rare but extreme cases. And it's important to mention here that sewage isn't just back-and-a-old. up into people's homes, which would be bad enough. It's also flowing out into yards and parks and rivers,

so it's contaminating the environment, too. Let's circle back to what's causing this issue. We've been talking about rainstorms and flooding. So, I don't know, this has got to be connected to climate change, right? Well, yes and no. So we know that storms are getting more frequent and more severe because of climate change. And Cahogia Heights is right at the base of these steep bluffs. When it rains, water flows down those bluffs and floods the city. So, yes, big rain events really do matter here, but climate change is just one part of the story because people are getting sewage in their homes, even during relatively light to moderate rain events, when the system should be able to handle it. And that's because the sewer and floodwater systems have been neglected here for decades.

What kind of neglect exactly? Well, to understand what exactly is happening here, you have to know a little bit about how the system was supposed to work. So in this city, you have two separate systems. You've got your stormwater system that's supposed to take rainwater and then funnel it out of the city into waterways like the Mississippi. Then you've got your sewer system, which is a totally separate set of pipes that takes sewage and sends that out to a water treatment plant. Yeah, and this makes sense, right? if you keep these systems separate, then when it rains a lot, that water goes back out into the river. The city then is just paying to treat the sewage, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's

exactly how the system's supposed to work. But the problem is in this city, the stormwater and sewer systems are not separate anymore. And that's because the physical infrastructure, so the things like the pipes and the pumps just haven't been maintained. So stormwater pipes are cracked or blocked up with sludge and tree roots. And then on top of that, some of the pumps that are supposed to be pumping floodwater out of the city are really old. Like we're talking 60, 70 years old in some cases, so they don't work as well or they don't work at all. And then the city floods. And we're not just talking about an inch or two of water here. Sometimes it can be waste deep in the streets. I mean, Walters had to get his boat out during some of the worst storms. I talked with Sean

Sullivan about what exactly is causing this year. He's with the St. Louis District of the Army Corps of Engineers. So storm sewers are undersized, unable to really accommodate the volume of inflow coming into them, whether they're either broken or whether they're blocked or whether the pipe diameters are just too small to handle some of the high-intensity rain conditions that we're seeing. And therefore, that surcharge stormwater that now is ponding on, on the surface is also getting into the sanitary sewer network through manholes. And then it starts to, in essence, back upstream, we'll call it, back up through the pipe to the point where it has to overflow into places we don't want it. Okay, so let me make sure I understand this. Because the stormwater drains

and the pumps aren't working, then water starts to pool on the streets, which then, I guess, flows down the manholes, which are connected to this other system, the sewer system. And then that system gets overwhelmed and it'll start to back sewage up into the homes. Yeah, that's exactly right. Oh, so you mentioned that this is an issue that's happening in other cities. Are the reasons they are similar? That's a really good question. And to answer it, I want to bring in Becca Costello. She's a local government reporter at WVXU in Cincinnati. And she's also the co-host of a new podcast called Backed Up about the Sewer issues there. Hi, Becca. I love the name of the podcast, by the way. It sounds like Cincinnati might be dealing with some its own sewage backups? Yeah, John, that's exactly right. The symptoms here in Cincinnati are

pretty much the same as what Shayla is describing in Illinois. And in Cincinnati, of course, we have that sewage and stormwater mixing together. But here, even though the symptom is the same, the cause isn't because of neglect. It's because the system was actually designed that way. And that's because Cincinnati has something called a combined sewer system. That's where the wastewater and the stormwater all go through the same set of pipes to the treatment plant. But during heavy rain, it overwhelms that system, it backs up into homes, it backs up into creeks and rivers. But these systems are actually really common in lots of cities, especially older cities. According to the EPA, there's about 700 communities in the U.S. with these combined sewer systems

that includes cities like St. Louis, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and it's really common in Europe, too. This, by the way, is why the Sen River in Paris got so much attention for water quality issues during the Summer Olympics just recently. I remember that story, Becca. Yeah, we covered that. So how long ago did these cities put in these combined sewer systems? And I don't know, why did so many places build them like this? So it's most common in cities established at least 150 years ago.

They have these combined sewer systems because it's what made sense at the time. Now, we have to remember that these were replacing open sewers in ditches and cesspools, which were causing a lot of public health problems. They also smelled terrible, of course. it was way cheaper to build a system that took everything you needed to get away from the people, away from the people, and do it at the same time. So this was the stormwater that was causing flooding and the sewage that was causing health concerns. Now, this was cutting-edge science at the time. It was a huge improvement over these cesspools, but obviously causing a lot of problems today.

Yeah, it seems like an improvement over cesspools, but still, for these combined systems, climate change, I assume, is more of an issue because there's just more water going into the system right now. Absolutely. So with combined sewer systems, they really are directly tied to heavy rainstorms because it's just pouring down in a short period of time. And that is happening more often because a warmer climate means more moisture in the atmosphere. Now, it's important to remember this is not necessarily about the total amount of rain. You know, it could rain every day for a year and not necessarily overwhelm the sewer system. But in Cincinnati, for example, the average rainfall intensity has gone up by more than half an inch. over the past 50 years, which half an inch doesn't sound like a whole lot, but this can absolutely overwhelm the system. And when that happens, the systems are designed to overflow into waterways, and this is a way to prevent it from backing up into streets and into homes. And when all this rain comes at once, the sewage can overflow and back up into basement. So you often see both of these problems happening together. Right. And I mean, when we're talking about sewage going into waterways, like we don't actually have great data on how much is flowing into rivers and streams

from these combined sewers. But the most recent EPA estimate that we have was about 850 billion gallons per year. And John, that's enough sewage to fill 1.3 million Olympic-sized swimming pools every year going into rivers and streams. But, and this is a big butt, that estimate is from 2004. So it's 20 years old. Lots of cities have cut down on sewage overflows since then. So the EPA says the total amount of sewage going into waterways could be half that amount. But again, we just, we don't have updated data from them, so we don't know. After the break, we'll take a look at what it would cost to fix America's aging sewers and what modern sewer infrastructure could look like. Let's get back to Cincinnati. So Becca, is the city trying to separate their sewer and stormwater systems now?

Well, some cities have gone that separation route. Minneapolis is the best example. They've actually almost completely separated their combined sewer system. But here in Cincinnati, it's too expensive and involved to actually separate the system because it means building a whole new set of pipes, which is a lot of money and a lot of construction. Instead, in Cincinnati, they're building mostly just bigger capacity, so bigger tanks, more storage, so that when all that rain comes, they can store it for a short period of time until the treatment plants are able to treat all of that sewer. and stormwater. The city is also trying to reduce how much water gets into the system in the first

place, and they're doing that with what's called green infrastructure projects. And the Lick Run Greenway is the best example. It's actually kind of been used as a national model. So the Lick Run was a stream that 100 years ago got put into a big underground pipe. And that neighborhood became one of the worst for sewer backups and combined sewer overflows. But what the city did is they returned that from a pipe back to an open stream now. And it can handle most of the stormwater from heavy rain, meaning the stormwater never has to mix with sewage. It can go straight to the Mill Creek, which ends up in the Ohio River. But it's important to say all of this is still extremely expensive. It's a multi-billion dollar effort over several decades. It's paid for by rate payers.

It's just not as expensive as it would have been to separate the systems. How about in Cahokia Heights, Shail, are they trying to do something similar to fix the problem there? In Coquay Heights, what they're trying to do is basically repair and replace a lot of this broken infrastructure. You know, so like the broken pipes and pumps that I was talking about. And around $50 million in state and federal funding has been set aside to fix these issues. But, I mean, this is a big job. We're talking about 90 miles of sewers in just this one city. And on top of that, a lot of the system hasn't even been fully mapped yet.

So this is just a huge undertaking. I don't know. I'm no engineer, Shaila, but 90 miles of pipe and only $50 million to pay for it. I mean, I don't know. Is that really enough to fix this problem? Yeah, it's a good question, John, and honestly, it's hard to know. I reached out to the mayor's office in the sewer department, but they didn't make anyone available for an interview. So as far as the total cost of how much it would take to completely fix this, that's kind of still a question mark. But what I can say is that they've started the work of repairing this system, which includes fixing pipes using this technique called cured in place pipelining. So basically, workers have these kind of long fabric-like tubes that look sort of like socks, and those tubes are soaked in resin. So the workers feed them into the broken pipes, inflate them, and then they blow really, really hot steam inside, which hardens the resin inside those fabric tubes. So that's why it's called pipelining, because it essentially creates a pipe inside of a pipe. The advantage with this technique is that it's a lot cheaper and faster than physically replacing the pipes, but it's just a temporary fix.

And we should mention that the process of installing them has been linked to health problems for workers and residents elsewhere in the country. So it sounds like this isn't a perfect solution, to say the least. So how are residents feeling about all this? Not surprisingly, residents are just really tired of dealing with this. In some cases, they've had raw sewage coming up into their homes regularly for decades. And many of these people are elderly and they're just worried that this isn't going to be fixed in their lifetimes. Let's get back to Walter. He's the resident that you talked to in the beginning of our story. Is he still living in this dream home of his?

Well, Walter does still own that house that he built, but he doesn't live there anymore. He can't get rid of the sewage smell no matter what he does. And the house also has a mold problem at this point. He says he's hoping the city will just buy him out so he could afford to buy a different house and maybe have something to leave to his grandkids someday. I asked him where he'd want that new house to be. I'm going to be like a bird. I'm going to go to the high spot.

Y'all see you living on a mountain somewhere. I know. They said, why the house is on top of that hill right there? Because I'm going to be the only more way up. I said, I ain't got to have this problem, no more. Oh, my goodness. I hope he's able to find that higher ground that he's looking for. Sheila, thanks so much for bringing us the story.

I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Sheila Farzaan is a reporter and editor with American Public Media. She was joined by Becca Costello, local government reporter at WVXU in Cincinnati. Becca is co-host of a new podcast called Backed Up. It's about the sewer issues in Cincinnati. And if you'd like to read more about the story, and for a link to Becca's great podcast, you can go to ScienceFriiday.com slash sewers at sciencefrily.com slash sewers.

And that's all the time we have for today. A lot of folks help make the show happen, including Jordan Smudjick, Diana Plasker, Annie Nero, Jason Rosenberg. On tomorrow's episode, an entomologist explores how insects have changed human culture, from art to engineering. I'm sci-fri producer D. Peter Schmidt. See you then.