Infrastructure is a most unsexy word — until human waste flows into the picture, at which point it gets both more popular and more, uh, visceral.Perhaps that's why those who designed the facilities that handle our storm- and wastewater weren't thinking about a scenario in which the region would weather three straight weeks of nearly nonstop downpours, an anomaly so rare that engineers don't design drainage to handle such high volumes.
A couple months back, stormwater officials in Tampa told us it would be highly cost-prohibitive to fortify a city against a hundred-year storm (let alone what might have been several of them in a 21-day period). So flooding will happen once in a while, and, as we saw in Tampa and St. Pete, wastewater treatment facilities will overflow, putting the public at risk should sewage — the really bad stuff — start to flow out.
City officials in St. Pete have been catching grief, and even the threat of a lawsuit, because of their chosen method of handling sewage after recent major flooding events, which was to pump at 15.4 million gallons of (untreated) sewage into Clam Bayou and five million gallons of (treated) sewage into Tampa Bay. It sounds disgusting and hazardous, and it possibly would be illegal, were this a state in which leadership actually cared about the environment.
But in a Twitter exchange with Tampa Bay Times reporter Michael Van Sickler, Mayor Rick Kriseman's spokesman, Ben Kirby, suggested the practice is safer than the alternative, which is to let stormwater and sewage flow out into the streets, as Tampa did when its many pumping stations reached their capacity, some of them breaking:
So, that's pretty gross, too.
Fortunately in St. Pete, after the Clam Bayou shitstorm, city officials reopened a pumping station at Albert Whitted, which had been closed for some time, so it could properly treat the excess sewage, making it less harmful before sending it out into the bay.
It's unclear what the environmental and public-health impacts of stormwater and sewage, treated or untreated, will be. But Tampa Bay Estuary Program spokeswoman Nanette O'Hara toldTampa Bay Times reporter Charlie Frago there are already signs of damage from runoff into waterways.
"We're already seeing greener water. We may see some substantial algae bloom," she said.