Next on the suspect lineup: the rain.
Storm clouds are an ill omen for a city with a combined sewer system like Cincinnati.
How has climate change affected precipitation trends in the area?
What happens to all that stormwater once it enters the MSD system?
And what happens to all the stormwater that never even makes it that far?
Check out the Backed Up digital exhibit through the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library to explore the history of the Cincinnati sewer system. Visit www.chpl.org/backed-up
Acronyms in this episode:
- CUFA = Communities United For Action
- MSD/MSDGC = Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati
- SBU = Sewer Backup
- CSO = Combined Sewer Overflow
- EPA = Environmental Protection Agency
Other information and resources in this episode:
- 2023 news article: Long neglected, the Mill Creek Corridor is getting renewed attention
- Communities United for Action website: https://www.cufacincy.org/
- From Climate Central: Extreme Precipitation in a Warming Climate
- From Climate Central: Climate Change and Inland Flooding
- Learn more about MSD's smart sewers
- Learn about MSD's plan to come into compliance with the Clean Water Act
- How to report a sewer backup in your home to MSD
- Learn more about the Consent Decree draft Phase 2B plan
See more photos and videos at wvxu.org/backedup
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Backed Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Assia Micheaux Johnson: Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. The rain makes running pools in the gutter. The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night. And I love the rain. April Rain Song by Langston Hughes, read for you by Assia Micheaux Johnson.
Becca Costello: I love how relaxing it can be to just sit and listen to raindrops falling.
Ella Rowen: Yeah me too. You get your little book out, light your little candle.
Becca Costello: But April rain here in Cincinnati can turn on you pretty quickly.
[Newscast audio]: Flash flooding across the area. This is just one of a number of places underwater tonight.
Lauren Casey: Yeah, I'm pro rain. I just don't want to harm anybody.
[Newscast audio]: Homes, cars, roads, submerged after torrential rain pounded local neighborhood.
Lauren Casey: Weather has the power to turn the tides of war, to shut down government.
Reese Johnson: None of us can stop the rain falling from the sky. And it's falling on all of us.
Ella Rowen: This is backed up from Cincinnati Public Radio. I'm Ella Rowen.
Becca Costello: I'm Becca Costello, and today we're releasing our inhibitions and feeling the rain on our skin. Humanity has a complicated relationship with rain. The most important ingredient for life is water. We need it to survive.
Ella Rowen: Too little rain and we get drought, but too much rain, and we get flooding, landslides, contaminated groundwater.
Becca Costello: And in older cities like Cincinnati, rain can mean raw sewage overflowing into waterways and backing up into people's basements.
Ella Rowen: That's why Becca and I are on the case. The case of the combined sewer system crisis of the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati. You know, the CSSC of the MSDGC.
Becca Costello: WTF.
Ella Rowen: We've got a new suspect for our case solving bulletin board: the rain. And the evidence is pretty damning.
Becca Costello: When it's actually raining, that's when you can see how much storm water can create a flooding or backup issue. It's like the crime scene dust that shows where the invisible fingerprints are.
Ella Rowen: Over time, the damage adds up. It sticks around long after the rain stops and the sun comes out,
Darlene Capell: This community has suffered a lot as far as getting the needs met for the residents.
Ella Rowen: That's long time North Fairmount resident Darlene Capell. She's a retired city worker and member of the North Fairmount Community Council.
Becca Costello: North Fairmount is part of a few neighborhoods known locally as the Beekman Street corridor bordering the Mill Creek on Cincinnati's west side.
Ella Rowen: We met Darlene at the North Fairmount community center across the street from her house this spring. There's a huge concrete retaining wall against a big hill meant to protect the center.
Becca Costello: We're in one of hilly Cincinnati's hilliest areas. And as we all know, water flows downhill. Stormwater runoff has been flowing into this retaining wall for decades, until a storm in early April of 2024 proved to be the final straw.
Darlene Capell: The water just was coming out and just running right on down the street like a river, and then all of a sudden, that was cracking, and then the whole thing fell down. Sound like a big old explosion.
Becca Costello: A section of the retaining wall, about 20 feet across, collapsed. A block of concrete toppling into the parking lot like a giant Domino. Can you describe again, what we're standing in front of? What does it look like?
Darlene Capell: A mess. (laughter)
Ella Rowen: Part of the hillside is exposed. Tree roots are sticking out of the dirt. Rocks have fallen down where yellow caution tape warns people away. Most of the wall is still standing, but you can see cracks that have been patched over the years.
Becca Costello: It's rained bad again since this collapsed, right? Was it kind of the same thing where it was just a river running into the street?
Darlene Capell: Yeah.
Becca Costello: Not long after Darlene retired a few years ago, she joined a group called CUFA, or Communities United for Action. That's where she met Renee Martin.
Ella Rowen: Renee is working with Darlene on a grant CUFA won from the federal EPA to help them look at storm water issues in North Fairmount and a few other nearby communities.
Renee Martin: The five neighborhoods or five areas they looked at on the site visit, South cumminsville, English Woods West, English Woods East, North Fairmont and South Fairmount. They looked at places where flooding was happening, overland flooding, damage to property, houses, basements from that in lots of cases, you could see or there was documented evidence of just like pooling water, flowing down people's yards and through their yards.
Becca Costello: Renee and Darlene walked us around North Fairmount, pointing out where flooding happens most often. It feels like every block has its own version of stormwater problems.
Darlene Capell: One resident, he lives on this street, but the water comes over Baltimore and pushes his wall, and then it floods his basement. And then where the school is at, is called Leap Academy, there's a creek behind there, so when that gets flooded, the water comes down on the street.
Ella Rowen: We ran into another member of the North Fairmount Community Council doing some work outside his home. Anthony Williams has lived in the neighborhood practically his whole life.
Anthony Williams: Now, when it rains up there, it's like a fountain, you know, coming down the steps from the backyard. It's just a lot of water.
Ella Rowen: Just like water in every direction, yeah?
Anthony Williams: Yeah, because you got it from this way, from the hills, it comes this way, then from here, it comes this way.
Becca Costello: Right across the street from Anthony's house is what looks like a park a couple blocks wide. In a few places, there's gravel instead of grass, surrounded by trees and native plants.
Darlene Capell: All of this was houses built all here, and the city bought up the property because it was so much flooding here.
Ella Rowen: A whole row of houses on about two blocks was torn down because they flooded so often, both from storm water and from untreated sewage backing up into the basements.
Anthony Williams: This was like a low point. It would back up and talk about, smell everything. It was just terrible.
Becca Costello: Now that the houses are gone, this park like area is a bioswale. That's basically a fancy term for a natural area that manages storm water.
Renee Martin: It's like partly piped, yeah, and partly exposed. And then the rain gardens are designed with drain pipes and gravel and plants to just help soak up water. This is great to help alleviate some of the low, low land. But what is most helpful is putting in this kind of stuff at the top of the hill. We like to say, catch the water where it falls, rather than letting it get all the way down the hill and then trying to absorb it at the bottom.
Ella Rowen: MSD completed this bioswale in 2015. It's the kind of solution needed in lots of other places too. The report funded by the EPA grant says the neighborhood should redirect water away from homes and streets as much as possible.
Becca Costello: That can be on a small scale, like with rain barrels and downspout extensions, or it can be larger, like a bioswale that takes up a whole block.
Renee Martin: And the more you can kind of stack up the hill, the better. So you catch as much as you can at the top, and then you keep kind of the hillside intact and plant things and capture water as it falls down the hill.
Becca Costello: So the EPA grant covered the study and identifying all of the problems and some possible solutions. Does it also cover paying for implementing the solution?
Renee Martin: So it does not.
Ella Rowen: The cost of these solutions is all over the place. One rain barrel might be only a couple hundred dollars. But a rain garden that benefits the whole neighborhood could be up to $75,000.
Becca Costello: CUFA asked Cincinnati City Council to allocate some funding for a pilot, but Council just approved the next budget last week -- that's mid June 2024 -- and the CUFA project is not included.
Ella Rowen: Instead, the city is applying for a federal grant that would include this pilot and a lot of other stormwater projects in the Beekman corridor. That grant is worth up to $20 million.
Darlene Capell: Once we get this pilot program up and running, we're looking at it like to be implemented in the two to three years, but then we looking down the road like for like a 10 year or more, that way it would benefit everyone in whatever neighborhood you live in.
Ella Rowen: The city will find out in early fall of 2024 if that $20 million grant is headed here to Cincinnati.
Becca Costello: Darlene, have there always been like storm water and flooding issues in this neighborhood, or has it gotten worse over time?
Darlene Capell: It has gotten worse.
Becca Costello: The climate is changing, and that means really intense rainfalls are happening more often. But you don't have to take my word for it. We checked in with meteorologist Lauren Casey.
Lauren Casey: My name is Lauren. I'm a meteorologist and lifelong weather nerd. I have a bachelor's in meteorology from Rutgers. I have a master's in Environmental Science and Policy from Johns Hopkins. And I'm passionate about bringing knowledge to people about weather and climate hazard information.
Ella Rowen: Lauren works for Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and communicators focused on helping people understand climate change.
Becca Costello: Can you talk kind of at a broad level, what is the relationship between weather and climate change?
Lauren Casey: So with climate change, we're warming the atmosphere. Warmer air can hold more moisture, about 4% more moisture, or more water vapor for every one degree Fahrenheit. So with that warmer atmosphere, there's more moisture available, which means more moisture produces heavier rains. So these kind of pouring, dumping rains are becoming much more frequent and much more common.
Ella Rowen: Cincinnati is getting more rain per year than we used to. But that's not even the real problem.
Becca Costello: It could rain a little bit every day for a year, and MSD's pipes and treatment plants might never be overwhelmed, but if all that rain falls in a shorter period?
Lauren Casey: For Cincinnati, your average annual rainfall intensity has gone up by more than half an inch over the last 50 plus years.
Ella Rowen: An extra half an inch doesn't seem so bad, right?
Lauren Casey: These small amounts can make a big difference. An inch and a half of rainfall in an hour, it's just like a complete downpour. Contributing to that also is the built environment, particularly in urban areas, which are covered in impervious surfaces.
Becca Costello: Ooh, impervious surfaces. Here's your chance to learn a new phrase to impress all your friends next time it rains.
Lauren Casey: Which is just a fancy way of saying anything that the water is not going to absorb into. So you're talking about asphalt, concrete, rooftops, parking lots. So that enhances and increases that runoff and also enhances a flash flooding threat as well.
Becca Costello: Impervious surfaces might be the real villain here, because if the rain falls on natural surfaces, like grass, fields, gardens, whatever, it can usually just soak into the soil.
Ella Rowen: Think back to the last time you went through a drive through for coffee or fast food and then realized you don't have any cup holders free. You roll down your window and dump the last of your old drink.
Becca Costello: The liquid hits the blacktop. You throw away the old cup and drive off with your fresh latte or Dr Pepper.
Ella Rowen: But have you ever noticed or wondered what happens to the last dregs of the beverage you heartlessly tossed onto the hot pavement?
Becca Costello: It can't soak into the blacktop. It has nowhere to go except the closest storm drain, and therefore, into the combined sewer system. By the way, the blacktop parking lot is the impervious surface here.
Ella Rowen: Now imagine millions of people dump their beverages in the same parking lot all at the same time. It's easy to see why that's a problem. The combined sewer system would flood, and what would happen to all that liquid once it's in the MSD system? Or even worse, what if it rained?
Becca Costello: We couldn't go down into the sewers ourselves, so we did the next best thing. We spoke to an expert.
Reese Johnson: Hi Reese, I'm Reese, and I work in sh*t.
Becca Costello: Did you say, Hi Reese, I'm Reese?
Reese Johnson: I'm Reese. Reese Johnson, I work at the Metropolitan Sewer District. I'm a water engineer. I moved to Cincinnati in 2004 to begin working on metropolitan sewer districts wet weather consent decree and wet weather improvement plan, initially as a consultant, and then was hired by MSD to help them, working as an employee on their wet weather improvement plan.
Ella Rowen: Quick reminder: the consent decree is the contract between MSD and the federal government. The wet weather Improvement Plan is a very expensive program to reduce how much untreated sewage MSD dumps into waterways during heavy rainstorms.
Becca Costello: Reese is a transplant to Cincinnati from Michigan, but he says he's here to stay.
Reese Johnson: We found a home in Cincinnati. We don't get enough snow though here, so I'm struggling. So I disappear to Michigan when I can.
Becca Costello: Although if we got more precipitation here, it might make your job a little harder.
Reese Johnson: Absolutely, yes, when it rains here, that makes my job a lot harder. But I've always been a fan of rain.
Ella Rowen: It's poetic, really. Reese enjoys a quiet rainy day just like the rest of us. But unlike most of us, he can't ignore the consequences of rain.
Reese Johnson: All this rain water is falling on the streets, and you see the grates on the side of the street that'll take that rain water in, and so the pipe is getting fuller and fuller, and it keeps getting conveyed closer and down the hill. And these things run by gravity, which is great, but eventually you get to a point where you can't convey it anymore. You run out of room, or the pipe that you're trying to get into is just not big enough. The place that happens is a place we call it an outfall, where it's designed to relieve that pressure, because the alternative would be that it backed up. And you wouldn't want that backing up in your house, and we don't want that backing up up into the in the neighborhoods or on the streets.
Becca Costello: Remember, this is how a combined sewer system is designed to work. Cincinnati has about 200 overflow points, mostly along the Mill Creek and Ohio River. There are some along Duck Creek and scattered throughout the city at smaller waterways.
Ella Rowen: This is where a combination of storm water and untreated sewage is released, and that keeps it from backing up into basements and streets, or it keeps that problem from being a lot worse than it is.
Becca Costello: I saw a combined sewer overflow in action a couple of months ago, and it was pretty wild. Oh, wow. Okay, so I am just north of the Western Hills viaduct. It is currently raining quite a bit, and I am watching this CSO currently overflow with combined sewer and storm water. So this is untreated sewage and storm water flowing into the Mill Creek right now. The actual CSO is basically a pipe sticking out of the hillside, and it's just an overflow point. It's designed this way. Got lightning and thunder. It's designed to do this only during wet weather. So when there's heavy rainfall, like there is right now, it will overflow into the Mill Creek. So the actual pipe is a little bit bigger than, like, a manhole. It is really coming out. Oh, I can smell it. Oh, wow, wow. That smells really strong. I am shocked by how strongly I can smell that. You can see that brown cloud basically coming from the pipe into the area where it's mixed into the Mill Creek. Wow. That is wild. That is wild. No wonder it smells.
Ella Rowen: Keep in mind, this was cutting edge technology for a really long time. As much as we hate to think of raw sewage in our creeks and rivers today, just remember, humanity used to be a lot closer to sewage like all the time. This system solves some critical public health problems.
Reese Johnson: And we do our best to keep as much of it in the sewer as possible. And that's back to the struggle of when it rains, we have a lot more than than the sewers could ever be built to handle. And so we do our best.
Ella Rowen: Is that like the traffic jam?
Reese Johnson: That is the traffic jam, yeah, cue the cool, like traffic jam music. That'd be a great like "honk honk." You got a highway or a road, right? And it's got two lanes. You only fit so many cars down there, right? Never mind if you had, like, an accident blocking one of those lanes. I mean, oh my gosh, right. And that's what happens if we get a blockage, like grease or debris or wipes or anything that get in there block it up. But let's say we had those two lanes of traffic. Well, then suddenly, you know, the Taylor Swift concert lets out, right? Wow. You cannot fit that many cars - you can't get 60,000 people out of downtown on two lanes. But in an hour or two hours, the streets are empty again. That's what happens to our sewers. When it's normal, every day, it's not raining, or maybe raining a little bit, our sewers have plenty of capacity. We're not overflowing. We have a very good sewer system in those conditions. But, man, when it rains and you're adding five or 10 times as much water because of what's, you know, the rainwater and everything that's getting everything that's getting in. You can't handle that with the same road. You can't handle that with the same pipe. That's our struggle.
Ella Rowen: But now there's better technology to help engineers at MSD keep some of that sewage from overflowing. And it's not just about building bigger and bigger sewer pipes.
Becca Costello: Sewer systems are built to take advantage of gravity -- water flows downhill. But something called a smart sewer system is more sophisticated.
Reese Johnson: What the smart sewer does is it tries to put a traffic cop inside the sewer, and that traffic cop is there, as you can imagine, directing the flow. We put electronic sensors out in the sewer that are kind of like the eyes of our traffic cop, and those sensors measure the depth in the sewer, or the amount of flow that's going through a pipe. The other part is that, well, we have to have gates or valves or other structures that can move that water where we'd like it to go, rather than where it's just going to go by gravity.
Becca Costello: That description was really helpful. I think I've mostly been thinking about the capacity issues with MSD as the pipes not being big enough to handle. But it sounds like a at least part of it, or maybe most of the problem, is that the treatment center can't process as much as it needs to quickly enough. Is it both? Is it more one than the other?
Reese Johnson: It's absolutely both. There are places where the pipes are just not big enough to convey on the water, and they'll never be big enough. I've heard like, oh, just build a bigger pipe. And even if we had the money to do that, we as a community had the money to build a bigger pipe, -- if you have a really big pipe under your street, there's not room for anything else, like water pipes and gas pipes. It would be really oversized for most of the time, like, it would be like this massive pipe under there. And big pipes actually don't work well when you only have the basic daily, you know, we call it average daily flow. There's also times where the treatment plant, even running at full bore, full throttle, can't take all that's being delivered to it, and they're they're processing as much as they can. We've built remote treatment plants that are designed just to treat that excess, what we call wet weather flows. Those help us to deal with those sudden rainstorms and treating those flows, rather than trying to force it all into the pipe down to a treatment plant that's overwhelmed. And that's that's, again, another thing the smart sewer system does is it has those facilities in the system, and they talk to each other through the communications, and they're actually working together, and they're saying, Okay, I've got capacity over here. I'm going to hold this. You keep going, and then we're not gonna start draining our tanks until you're ready for us down at the pump station or the treatment plant.
Ella Rowen: And these adjustments are actually happening automatically, so you don't need someone sitting at a control board pushing the buttons. And it helps a lot.
Becca Costello: In 2023 MSD's smart sewer system prevented over 740 million gallons of sewage and stormwater from overflowing,
Ella Rowen: There's a pretty big cost benefit, too.
Reese Johnson: That's where I think smart sewers really shine.
Ella Rowen: MSD keeps track of how much money it takes to keep the system from overflowing. But how exactly does MSD make that calculation? Reese broke it down for us.
Reese Johnson: The metric we use is the is the cost per gallon. When you look at more traditional, gray infrastructure methods, ripping up the street and putting in a bigger pipe or making a big tank, that is somewhere between 40 to 80 cents a gallon. If you were to say, Well, maybe it's the treatment plant that's too small, let's upgrade the treatment plant or put a new one in. That's around $1 a gallon.
Becca Costello: Don't forget, we're talking about billions of gallons of overflow every year, and that adds up fast. MSD started installing and using smart sewer technology in 2017. That's when the savings really started to become obvious.
Reese Johnson: When we ran the numbers on even the earliest implementation of the smart sewer system, where we had a lot of upfront costs to put the sensors in and get the systems up, even with all those upfront costs we were seeing cost per gallons at a penny. And so that's where we said, we need to take this and run with it. We need to do this wherever we can, because this is the most cost effective way to reduce those overflows that we are all trying to reduce.
Becca Costello: So I think that begs the question, why not go all in on smart smart sewers? Why are we doing anything other than installing smart sewers everywhere in the whole system?
Reese Johnson: That's great. I love that. I think we are going all in on smart sewers. There is a point, and I have to admit, at some point there's so much water you have to build bigger pipes and bigger storage and bigger treatment plants in some places, but significantly less than you would if you used the traditional technology of a big pipe or a big treatment plant.
Ella Rowen: We've kind of been asking everybody the same question, which is like, is there a villain in this overarching story? And to me, what it sounds like from hearing you today, it's kind of like a man versus nature struggle.
Reese Johnson: I think I struggle with -- I struggle with that a little bit, and I'll tell you why. I think for a long time -- it's just going to get pretty deep -- for a long time, humans have seen themselves in conflict with nature, fighting to control it. I see that as one of humans fundamental flaws is that we feel like we're in competition or we must control and dominate nature. But if we could all say, Okay, it's not the villain, but that's the source: it's raining, right? And we want to live here, and we don't want to be flooded, then how do we come together to work together to fix that? There is a lot more rain coming. So this is getting more urgent as an issue. Us as a community, we want to thrive, not just survive, but thrive here. We need to get a handle on that and find ways to work together to solve it.
Becca Costello: It's pretty amazing when you think about how far we've come. We all inherited infrastructure that was designed without any consideration for protecting the environment, because 150 years ago, environmental protection just wasn't in the collective awareness. But now MSD builds green infrastructure like the bioswale in North Fairmount and the Lick Run Greenway in South Fairmount. More on that in the next episode, by the way.
Ella Rowen: But MSD is also planning to build some very expensive new treatment plants that will only operate during heavy rainstorms, and some advocates say they should be doing more green infrastructure instead. That includes Marilyn wall, the woman suing MSD along with the Sierra Club.
Marilyn Wall: There's an opportunity in front of us to do a much better job than we have done, even though the MSD is not a stormwater utility, and they're pretty clear about that.
Becca Costello: I should probably already know this. But I hear you say, MSD is not a stormwater utility, and that surprised me for some reason. Maybe I should know this already, but what do you mean by that? Because it seems like I mean, they deal with stormwater all the time.
Marilyn Wall: I know, and they've got so many storm sewer pipes they take care of because they're all going into their combined pipes, right? And that they they own an astronomical a number of them.
Becca Costello: So how are they not a stormwater utility?
Ella Rowen: On the next episode of Backed Up...
Diana Christy: MSD can't do anything about the stormwater that is not in its system already.
Karen Ball: I learned then that someone had to pay attention to this stuff.
Diana Christy: This is a really exciting time for us at MSD.
Ella Rowen: Backed Up is a Cincinnati Public Radio podcast, produced with support from PRX and made possible in part by a grant from the John S. and James L. Night Foundation.
Becca Costello: Backed Up is reported and produced by Becca Costello — that's me — and Ella Rowen, with support from Casey Kuhn.
Ella Rowen: Thanks to everyone who helped put this episode together and bring it to life: Assia Micheaux Johnson, Tana Weingartner, Jenn Merritt, Ronny Salerno, Zack Carreon, Marshall Verbsky, Steven Baum, Brittany Mayti, Kevin Reynolds and Leslie Smith.
Becca Costello: Maryanne Zeleznik is our VP of news. Jenell Walton is our VP of content. Nicole Tiffany made our podcasts cover art. Special thanks to Sam Ransohoff, Toni Carlson, Grace Abler, Stephanie Kuo, and Mike Russo.
Ella Rowen: Go to wvxu.org/backedup to find a transcript of this episode. Plus lots of pictures and extra info. Basically everything except the smell of the sewers.
*beep*
Reese Johnson: Do you know how many manholes we have?
Becca Costello: Oh, I couldn't even begin to guess.
Reese Johnson: 90,000.
Becca Costello and Ella Rowen: 90,000 manholes?!
Ella Rowen: That's way more than I would've expected.
*beep*
Becca Costello: Ooh. It sounds - it sounds like grade school, like... Ella and Johnny, sittin in a tree.
Ella Rowen: You take that back.
*beep*
Becca Costello: OMG, WTF.
Ella Rowen: You sounded Irish. WTF.
Becca Costello: (in a bad Irish accent) WTF.
