What's the Problem?
Every year, about 14.1 billion gallons of raw sewage – mixed with storm water – overflows from our sewers into local streams and rivers and also backs up into basements. This is not an accident or oversight, but the result of a sewer system designed to meet the needs of an earlier generation, not our modern society.
To better protect our health and the environment, wastewater utilities like ours across the nation – the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSD) – are being required to improve their sewer systems, particularly those with combined sewers that carry both sewage and storm water in the same pipes.
When our great grandparents and grandparents built and paid for our sewers, they made an expensive investment in their future, but one that would not last forever. Buried deep underground, parts of our current system are deteriorating due to age, and portions are not big enough to handle the present mixture of sewage and storm water that enter it during heavy rains.
To resolve this problem, the U.S. EPA has mandated that MSD capture, treat, or remove 85% of the 14 billion gallons of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and eliminate all sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs), about 100 million gallons. This mandate, known as a "Consent Decree," requires Hamilton County residents to invest in their sewer system once again. You can learn more about Consent Decrees at MSD's website.
To meet the demands of modern society, we must adapt and improve our 180-year-old sewer system so it can continue to meet its core mission: protecting public health and the environment through collection and reclamation of our most precious of resources – water.
