When news broke of a whistleblower calling out the City of St. Petersburg for reporting drastically low estimates of the amount of sewage it dumped as Hurricane Hermine hit, I'd just showered under a rainwater-fed trickle in a remote region of Costa Rica.
For all its obvious flaws — the infrastructure's a mess, the water's undrinkable — Costa Rica is aware of where its water comes from and where it goes.
Contrast that with attitudes in the U.S., especially Florida, where few residents can even spell the word aquifer, let alone tell you what one is.
People don't think about where water comes from or goes, said Mary Yeargen, southwest director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, at a recent meeting.
“I think for the most part the average citizen just assumes it will be taken care of,” she said.
In the Tampa Bay area, officials are now grappling with the consequences of that obliviousness.
Over the past year, the dumping of sewage into Tampa Bay has become a major political football, and officials are lawyering up in an effort to figure out who's to blame.
There's the closing of the Albert Whitted plant, which could have spared millions of gallons from going into the bay as a result of Hermine. A 2014 study recommended not shutting it down — the third study done on the issue in under five years — but St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman claims neither he nor the City Council saw that report until earlier this month.
Some Democrats blame prior (all or mostly) Republican city and county administrations for ignoring sewer-pipe corrosion (largely how the rainwater gets into municipal wastewater) in the name of low taxes.
But the fact is, there's no silver bullet that's going to prevent another massive sewage dump next year or even next week.
The city may be able to get Albert Whitted back online by 2018 (it's been storing wastewater, but not fully treating it, this summer) — that's the rosy estimate. But cities throughout the county still have cracked and corroded sewer pipes to contend with, not to mention peripheral pipes in need of repair that are feeding into municipal sewers from private homes and businesses.
So, every time it rains a bit heavily, officials in St. Pete, Largo, Clearwater, Tampa and many other jurisdictions have to ask themselves whether to let nasty wastewater flow out into the bay, potentially harming wildlife, or do nothing and allow sewage to back up into homes, threatening human health.
“The problem with addressing issues within urban water systems is that there's no overnight fixes,” said Jennifer Stokes-Draut, an expert in urban water systems at the University of California Berkeley's Berkeley Water Center. “It takes a long time to plan and install and implement changes to water systems, and once you put them in place, they last for a really long time.”
The Tampa Bay region is far from the only one experiencing such a phenomenon.
Alexandria, Virginia, for example, has been dumping sewage into the Potomac River for decades after heavy rains. In the past year, so have cities in Vermont and Maryland, among others. Even in London, officials dump sewage into the Thames.
Still, none of these cities dumped as high a volume as the 250 million gallons dumped into Florida west-coast waters as a result of Hermine.
While officials at the state and local level want to tackle the problem at a micro level — replacing pipes and upgrading treatment facilities — climate change activists are hoping they see it as an opportunity to grow more resilient in the face of rising seas and increasingly intense weather.
“Trying to address just the sewer issue without addressing the overall issue of climate change is like your house burning down and you're talking about buying new furniture,” said Kofi Hunt of the group Awake Pinellas.
Stokes-Draut said cities vulnerable to the kind of storms and flooding that can lead to sewage dumps would be wise to check out green infrastructure, like areas that collect rainwater and allow it to slowly percolate rather than washing over paved areas, or pervious (as opposed to impervious) concrete, which soaks up some stormwater, thereby reducing flooding.
Kriseman hopes to commit nearly $60 million to overhaul the city's wastewater infrastructure in the short term, and it would be surprising if other levels of government didn't start kicking in more.
If there's a silver lining in all this, it could be that it's finally making people think about something many take for granted.
“I suspect with the amount of attention that these overflows are getting in your area, there is an opportunity for people to really try to understand the system and their impact on the urban water system,” said Stokes-Draut. “And it's important to take advantage of those opportunities and make sure that people are more informed for the next time so that we don't just keep repeating the same mistakes. Because on an average day, nobody's thinking about these things.”
This article appears in Sep 22-29, 2016.