The Gateway City is building a massive tunnel system to capture billions of gallons of polluted stor
Lets hope the EPA does not lift any valuable regulations related to these type projects.
How a Sewer Will Save St. Louis
The Gateway City is building a massive tunnel system to capture billions of gallons of polluted storm water before it reaches the Mississippi.
By Erick Trickey
April 20, 2017
ST. LOUIS—Deep down a sunlit shaft, 175 feet under the North Riverfront neighborhood on the city’s far edge, Shayne Peck’s crew is beginning to hack a giant tunnel out of the limestone. Three men hang in the air on lifts, cutting into the rock face at spots marked with red paint. “They’re drilling holes,” says Peck, whose son is one of the drillers, “so we can load ’em with explosives.”
The start of the tunnel, just above the crew and the red-painted limestone, looks like the entrance to a cave in a cliff wall. Future blasts, Peck says, will deepen the tunnel—only 50 feet long now— until it stretches more than half a mile. This is not a tunnel for commuter trains or cars. It’s more of a horizontal well, and when it is complete in 2020, it will capture up to 12 million gallons of sewage-contaminated storm water, keeping it out of the Mississippi River. In effect, it will be a giant septic tank. But it won’t even be the biggest one in St. Louis.
The massive tunnel Peck has just started will soon be dwarfed by its successors. St. Louis is building a gargantuan system, including 28 miles of storage tunnels, to handle the city’s most stomach-churning water pollution problem. About 50 times a year, after major rainstorms, St. Louis’ sewers overflow, and 13 billion gallons of sewage-contaminated storm water escapes into the Mississippi River and its tributaries. It’s an everyday environmental nightmare and a risk to human health. And it’s a common, if largely undiscussed, urban American affliction.
All across the Northeast and Midwest, and in some regions beyond, more than 700 older cities still dump toilet waste into their oceans, lakes and rivers. The nasty problem is built into the cities’ infrastructure, a relic of early 20th-century engineering practices that were considered engineering triumphs in their day. The sewer systems, built decades ago, combine storm water and wastewater in the same pipes. On normal days, those millions of gallons of waste pass through a treatment plant. But after storms, the sewers become overwhelmed and the treatment plants can’t keep up. Instead of allowing the excess water to back up into streets and basements, the solution from decades past was to build overflow valves that divert some of the untreated flow into the nearest waterway. According to an Environmental Protection Agency report, just at the nation’s major beaches—a small portion of the country’s swimming areas—about 3,500 to 5,000 Americans a year get sick because of sewage-contaminated water.
That’s not OK anymore. Under pressure from the federal government, cities have embarked on decades-long projects to cut down on the sewage they spew. Since the 1990s, the EPA has used the Clean Water Act to take legal action against about 200 large and medium-sized cities. For big cities, the cost of compliance runs into the billions of dollars. ...........................
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