Why Do American Cities Still Dump Raw Sewage?

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Its 2025 and in the last 5000 years or so of human civilization we’ve made some pretty amazing advancements and done some fairly impressive feats of engineering and construction … but theres one big thing that we haven’t quite gotten dialed in… and that is dumping raw sewage in our waterways. The scope of the issue is pretty staggering … an estimated 80% of the world’s sewage makes its way into waterways untreated. Even in developed nations like the United States we have cities all over the country that simply accept untreated sewage outflows that measure in the millions, or in some cases, billions of gallons per year.

So why is America … the same country that sent a man to the moon and invented the personal computer still unable to avoid dumping poop into the same water that we all drink from and swim in? The problem is multifaceted, but arguably the biggest problem is our sewer systems. When a lot of American cities were first being developed there were a lot less people and a lot less understanding of the downsides of dumping untreated water into our rivers and oceans. Many of the early sewer systems in America were what we now know as combined sewer systems. These systems took on both the role of a sewer system and a stormwater management system.

The big problem with these systems, especially today, is that when they get a big influx of water via a significant rain storm, they simply don’t have the capacity to contain and treat all of the rainwater/sewage mixture. Structured overflows allow the excess untreated liquid to be released into waterways. According to the EPA, there are over 700 communities in the USA that have these dated combined sewer systems, nearly all of which suffer from some degree of overflow problem. Nearly all of these communities are in the northeast and midwest.

Chapters
0:00 - Intro
0:46 - The Big(gest) Problem
1:40 - New York's poop problem
2:36 - Nature's remarkable resiliency
3:00 - Its not just combined systems
3:30 - Baltimore being Baltimore
5:00 - Baltimore's Inner Harbor..... swimmable?
6:48 - Swimming in the Inner Harbor months before massive fish kill event
7:16 - The very simple (but not necessarily easy) solution
9:18 - Success stories (South Boston CSO tunnel)