Clean Water Program Reports
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Executive Summary
As the new home of Ohio PIRG's environmental work, Environment Ohio can be contacted regarding this report.
More than thirty years after the Cuyahoga River was engulfed in flames and the Clean Water Act was
passed to clean up America’s waterways, Ohio’s lakes, rivers, and streams continue to be plagued by
pollution.
Lake Erie, arguably Ohio’s most important waterway continues to be threatened by pollution. Cherished
by boaters, fishers, and families for its beaches, wildlife, and recreational uses, our Great Lake also provides
drinking water to over eleven million people. While many different contaminants, ranging from
mercury to PCBs, negatively impact Lake Erie, this report focuses on one major pollutant that we can eliminate:
raw, untreated sewage. From January - December 2004, Lake Erie was flooded with more than
eight billion gallons of untreated sewage.
This report surveys how much sewage was dumped into the Lake Erie watershed basin from January -
December 2004, looks critically at how our communities and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency
(OEPA) are dealing with sewage pollution and protection of public health, and offers a range of solutions
for eliminating sewage and protecting the public.
The Problem
Combined sewers take in and attempt to treat sewage and rainwater.
Combined sewer overflows are
instances in which rainwater and untreated sewage overflow into our streams, lakes and rivers, including
Lake Erie. Fifty-three communities within the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, ranging from small towns like
Avon Lake, to the larger metropolitan cities, have combined sewers and are plagued by combined sewer
overflows (CSOs). Together, these fifty-three communities have 623 combined sewer overflow outfalls, or
pipes, that feed into waterways that lead into Lake Erie, or directly into the Lake itself.1 An analysis of
just eleven of the fifty-three communities that dump untreated sewage shows that these communities
dumped more than eight billion gallons of sewage into the Lake Erie watershed from January - December
2004. This is equivalent to more than two billion toilets flushing into Lake Erie: a drinking water source
for over eleven million people.
Combined sewage overflows are a major source of beach advisories, wildlife destruction, and human
health problems.2 Untreated sewage contains disease-causing pathogens including E. Coli, Hepatitis A,
and Giardia.3 Anyone who comes into contact with water that is contaminated with sewage is putting
their health at risk. Sewage is also a likely contributor to the dead zone in Lake Erie’s central basin.
The Clean Water Act calls for the elimination of untreated or partially treated sewage releases into our
waters. The law also requires that until sewage discharges are eliminated, sewage treatment facilities
must monitor, report, and notify the public of all CSO events. Here in Ohio, sewage discharges go largely
unmonitored and are severely underreported to the OEPA. The OEPA does not enforce any consistent
reporting of sewage dumping, nor do they enforce any public notification requirements when raw
sewage is dumped. Therefore, neither the state agency, nor the public, is consistently aware of the billions
of gallons of sewage being dumped into Lake Erie’s waterways. Without this information, the OEPA
cannot achieve its goals of enforcing the Clean Water Act and eliminating pollution in our waterways. In
the meantime, the public cannot adequately protect themselves from the disease-causing bacteria found
in untreated sewage.
Solutions
To eliminate sewage from entering our waterways and protect public health, the Ohio PIRG Education
Fund recommends the following:
1) Communities need to incorporate technologies that help prevent excessive storm
water from flooding our sewer systems. With more control over the storm water that
enters our combined sewer systems, there will be less sewage overflowing into our
waterways.
2) Our state officials need to support more funding for sewage infrastructure improvements
that strive toward the elimination of sewage overflows, such as the separation
of septic and storm sewage systems.
3) The OEPA needs to make reporting of any and all sewage discharges mandatory
and consistent. The wastewater treatment facilities and the OEPA should notify the
public in real time when these public health threats occur.
4) One promising development in the effort to stop sewage dumping is the recent creation
of the Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes coalition and the EPA-led Great Lakes
Regional Collaborative. Both efforts are in the process of finalizing a fundable plan
to restore the Great Lakes, including the “virtual elimination” of sewage dumping. The
outcomes from this process will impact the future of eliminating sewage discharges into
the Great Lakes.
Eliminating sewage dumping will take political will, citizen activation, funding and forward thinking. And,
until the day comes when sewage dumping is eliminated, state officials need to track how much sewage
we are dumping and develop comprehensive public notification programs to protect the public.
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