photos by David Bader
We are 240 feet below the Milwaukee harbor, inside a massive, seeping cavern of pale gray rock. Puddles of water litter the ground and more water drips from the clammy walls. The scene might suggest some damp chamber of hell if not for the engineering equipment and hard-hatted workers on hand.
“Fire in the hole!” shouts one. Moments later a series of dynamite blasts echo back down the corridor to where we stand as the explosives burst into the rock ahead. Then comes the shock wave – a cool burst of wind blowing back from the excavation.
This is the Harbor Siphons project. The $138 million dig is gouging two 17-foot-wide tunnels across the harbor to more quickly flush water from the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s sewer lines to the Jones Island treatment plant, saving room in the Deep Tunnel.
It is just one part of an ongoing project to keep sewage from overflowing in heavy storms. Another tunnel on the Northwest Side that holds 89 million gallons went into operation in February 2006. Deteriorating sewer pipes are being re-lined with flexible resin material that cures into a hard plastic material. All told, the district will spend another $1 billion by the end of 2010.
Despite its continuing improvements, when it comes to the average citizen, the MMSD is a near laughingstock, the Rodney Dangerfield of government agencies. Talk-radio attacks, negative Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headlines and a series of lawsuits have portrayed the sewerage district as an incompetent, reckless befouler of Lake Michigan.
That would be understandable if all this money went for naught – which is still a commonly held view. But in fact, the MMSD has made huge improvements in Milwaukee’s sewage system and is considered a national leader.
“Their operation is one of the best wastewater programs in the country,” says Don Theiler, the recently retired director of the King County Wastewater Treatment Division in Seattle. Theiler is a Tomahawk native who worked for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources before his time in Seattle, and he’s been back to study Milwaukee’s system in detail, writing a major report on its strengths and weaknesses. “If you look around the country, very few cities have invested as much. I wish our system in Seattle were as up to date as Milwaukee’s.”
So why then is Milwaukee’s system so reviled locally? Observers offer several reasons. Simplistic and ill-informed media critics. The “Sewer Wars,” the Bleak House-like legal battle of the 1980s and ’90s that pitted Milwaukee County communities against outlying suburbs over how to pay for $3 billion in improvements, led by the Deep Tunnel project. And finally, a district whose leaders sometimes contributed to its negative image.
“I do think they were overly defensive,” says Peter McAvoy, director of environmental health at the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center and a longtime player in water policy. “I don’t think the MMSD was as forthright about the nature of the problem and their contribution to it. But that has changed in the past few years. They’re much more forthcoming.”
Indeed, the leadership of executive director Kevin Shafer, who took over in 2002, has instituted a new era for the MMSD. Shafer has earned plaudits from a wide range of municipal officials, including suburban officials who feuded with the district during the Sewer Wars. Even the MMSD’s fiercest critic, talk radio’s Mark Belling, has had praise for Shafer.
“Kevin’s a breath of fresh air – he’s very cooperative,” says Bill Mielke, an engineer who for years battled the MMSD during the Sewer Wars, but today is a welcome advisor at the district headquarters just south of Downtown.
The irony is that, for all the attention to sewage dumping in rainy weather, the MMSD has largely solved the problem,
reducing overflows to a level as low as possible. The single biggest cause of pollution in Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee watershed is stormwater running off streets and sidewalks in both cities and suburbs. Stormwater is also the culprit in another, less-recognized problem – when it leaks into deteriorating sewers, leading to overflows.
In short, the media and MMSD’s critics have been focusing on the wrong problem. Milwaukee still has challenges to come, problems that could take hundreds of million of dollars to solve. But the citizens have yet to understand the real story, because it hasn’t really been told.
• • •
The sky is overcast on a Monday morning last fall and about two dozen men, mostly well north of 60, are gathered for breakfast at the Congregational Home in Brookfield. After a breakfast of pancakes, sausage and eggs, the members of the Suburban Retired Men’s Club amble into the home’s open chapel.
“Who’s our speaker today?” one of them asks. “Kevin Shafer,” his companion replies. “The executive director of the sewerage district.”
The first man smirks. “Ah. The guys who dump all that stuff in Lake Michigan. I wonder if he’ll bring that up.”
He doesn’t have to wait long for his answer. Over the next 20 minutes or so, Shafer, a nattily dressed engineer with reddish-brown hair and a relaxed smile, addresses the question in great detail, walking his audience through a PowerPoint lecture he’s delivered more times than Tom Hanks has given Oscar speeches.
The first miracle may be Shafer’s crisp, concise style, actually making the story of municipal water treatment accessible. Of course, he does have visuals. He begins with shots of Milwaukee’s first sewage treatment operation, opened in 1888: the Milwaukee River Flushing Station. Today a popular Alterra Coffee café on Lincoln Memorial Drive, the flushing station drew in Lake Michigan water and flushed it into the Milwaukee River, then an open sewer. “We flushed all that water out to the lake,” Shafer tells his audience, “which is where we got our drinking water from.”
His raised eyebrows show that Shafer knows what his audience is thinking: Isn’t that sort of like the problem we have today? He goes on with the story. In 1921, the city’s Sewerage Commission took over the fishing village of Jones Island south of Downtown and pounded wood timbers into the ground to support a new sewage treatment plant that was opened in 1925. Those timbers remain the foundation of the MMSD plant today.
The new plant, an innovation of the city’s old “sewer Socialist” leaders, treated sewage by feeding it to microorganisms that digested the muck, leaving behind treated sludge and purified water. The process also yielded Milorganite, a nationally known fertilizer marketed by the district that is made from the dead bodies of the pollution-
eating bacteria.
By 1968, a second facility, the South Shore wastewater treatment plant opened in Oak Creek. Today, the district collects sewage from 1.1 million people in 28 communities. They span a 411-square-mile area that extends from Lake Michigan into eastern Waukesha County and north into Ozaukee and Washington counties. South Milwaukee is the only community in Milwaukee County that treats its own sewage rather than sending it to the MMSD.
The sewerage district itself controls 300 miles of pipes that collect wastewater, and these lines in turn are fed by some 3,000 miles of community sewer lines and another 3,000 miles of private sewer lines. In short, 95 percent of the pipeline in the system is not controlled by MMSD.
In dry weather, the two MMSD plants together treat up to 120 million gallons of sewage a day. In heavy rainfall, the volume can shoot up by nearly five times that amount, leaving the two plants to process 550 million gallons or more.
Why the increase? No, we don’t all flush our toilets more when it’s raining. The main culprit is combined stormwater and sewage pipes found in about 5 percent of the district – a 27-square-mile patch covering the East Side of Milwaukee and Shorewood. These sewer lines do double duty, collecting not only effluent from homes and businesses, but also polluted stormwater draining from streets, highways and sidewalks. The combined sewer lines belong to the two communities, not to the MMSD. But they connect to the sewerage district’s system. And when the rains come, the volume of water in the combined sewers surges like a tidal wave.
And when the volume is too much for the sewer lines, control gates along the MMSD sewer lines are opened to send that water straight out into the waterways that lead to Lake Michigan in what the district calls a sewer overflow, or critics call dumping.
At this point of the story, Shafer projects a pie chart on the screen in the darkened room, with statistics on “Fecal Coliform Readings.” Fecal coliforms are bacteria that can indicate – but not always with certainty – that water has been contaminated with feces.
The data is surprising. Back in 1975, half of all the fecal coliforms in area waters were attributed to combined sewer overflows. Farmland runoff, contaminated with fertilizer and animal manure, accounted for another 21 percent, and urban runoff from streets and sidewalks for 23 percent.
By 2000, the statistics looked radically different. For one thing, the total fecal coliform pollution is now drastically lower: half of what it was in 1975. Moreover, combined sewer overflows now accounted for just 7 percent of fecal coliforms. Farmland runoff still accounted for another 21 percent, but urban runoff now accounted for an amazing 68 percent of the problem.
How did this dramatic transformation take place? Twenty-five years of development had added lots of concrete in municipalities in the region, greatly increasing the runoff – polluted with bird droppings and other matter – into the lake and rivers. While that was increasing, the amount of combined sewer overflow plummeted.
Driven by the passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1977 and a court order requiring Milwaukee to stop discharging sewage into the waterways, the MMSD embarked on a building program that would cost some $3 billion over 25 years. Sewer lines were repaired. The Jones Island and South Shore plants were upgraded. And the Deep Tunnel was built.
Three hundred feet below ground, the Deep Tunnel – 19.4 miles long and ranging from 17 to 32 feet in diameter – can hold 405 million gallons of liquid when its access gates are opened. “It’s like a big bathtub that takes water when this system’s full,” Shafer explains.
Before that bathtub opened in the mid-1990s, combined sewer overflows were common during major storms. About 50 to 60 times a year, the agency spilled untreated sewage and stormwater into the waterways.
After building the Deep Tunnel, the district had a place into which it could flush all this water. Once the sun comes out and dries up all the rain, the district gradually releases the water from the tunnel and through the sewerage system to be treated.
Shafer advances his PowerPoint to a dramatic bar graph. Until 1994, the tunnel’s first year of operation, overflows from both the combined sewer lines and the separate sanitary sewer lines routinely hit 8 or 9 billion gallons a year. Since then, the average has declined to 1.4 billion gallons, although there were dramatic spikes in 1997, 1999 and 2000. Compared to 50 or more overflows per year, the average has fallen to just one or two a year.
“Although you’ll read about it a lot when we have overflows, they happen a lot less now,” Shafer says. “When people tell me the tunnel isn’t working, I show them that overflow graph. And I say, ‘Walk down to the RiverWalk and tell me it isn’t working.’ ”
By now, one man in the audience has fallen asleep, snoring softly, his jaw agape; that more haven’t done so, considering the topic being discussed, is a tribute to Shafer. Unruffled, he moves to another issue widely misunderstood by the public.
Milwaukee beaches have been shut repeatedly in recent years, with the media linking this to sewer overflows. In fact, there’s little or no relationship, according to research led by Sandra McLellan, a scientist with the Great Lakes WATER Institute at UW-Milwaukee. The studies found that seagull droppings – not sewage pollution – was the likely cause of contamination that closed South Shore Beach repeatedly in July and August of 2001.
McLellan’s studies were funded by the sewerage district – a point the Journal Sentinel made note of in a story reporting her findings. But she says the funding source was irrelevant. Hers was peer-reviewed academic research, not consultant research, and she was accountable only to fellow scientists. Had the district ever tried to distort her conclusions, “I’d be all over them.”
At public meetings over beach contamination, McLellan says she has confronted the widespread misunderstanding, fueled by the media, that sewer overflows are to blame. It’s taken a while, she says, to begin to change people’s assumptions. But now with seven years of data to look back on, “it became very clear that this was a localized waterbird issue.”
She’s largely persuaded officials who watch the sewerage district closely. “When we have to close beaches around here, it has nothing to do with the sewerage district,” says Elm Grove Village PresidentNeil Palmer. “If you don’t like it, shoot a seagull!”
Or, as Shafer tells the Congregational Home retirees, “Beaches will still close, even if we have zero overflows.”
• • •
What Shafer’s PowerPointdoesn’t tell is the history of how the Deep Tunnel was built, the controversy over how to pay for it, and why there remains a persistent belief that the massive project was a failure.
When the tunnel was first proposed back in the 1970s, it was seen as an alternative to separating the combined storm/sewer systems in Milwaukee and Shorewood. But then-Mayor Henry Maier resisted separation – and so did regional planners.
The decision not to separate the system is the linchpin of talk radio host Mark Belling’s longstanding crusade against the MMSD, and he’s not the only one to call it a mistake. The critics contend that money was the driving force behind this decision, because the cost of separating the systems would have fallen primarily on the city, while the cost of the alternative – the Deep Tunnel – was spread across the region.
“If I had been emperor at the time that Henry Maier forced the Deep Tunnel, I would have gone the other way,” says Elm Grove’s Neil Palmer, today a staunch defender of the MMSD’s record. “The political and social decision was made not to tear up the city of Milwaukee for 10 years.”
But the idea that the Deep Tunnel was done to save Milwaukee isn’t shared by one of the key policy makers of that era. Phil Evenson is the recently retired director of the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission. SEWRPC is a group that serves and is run by leaders from the seven counties of Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Walworth, Washington, and Waukesha. Milwaukee officials have periodically complained that the group favors outlying communities at the expense of the city. Yet, SEWRPC studied the sewerage issue, doing a major engineering assessment as far back as 1971, and rejected the option of separating the combined sewers in Milwaukee and Shorewood.
“We believed if you separated the sewers, you missed capturing all the dirty runoff and cleaning that, too,” Evenson recalls. “That was a pretty compelling argument 30 years ago, and it remains that today.” Moreover, evidence was already showing that during heavy storms, significant amounts of stormwater would leak into even those sewer lines intended only for sanitary sewage. “We were going to have to build the tunnel system anyway to handle the massive inflow from the separate suburban sewer systems.”
The question of who had to pay for what solution “was never part of the debate,” he insists. “It was always, what was best for water quality.”
Once the decision was made, the question of how to pay for it became very contentious. Should communities served by the district be charged by volume of water used, or based on the value of the property owned by each home and business? Charging based on volume would have been very expensive for heavy users of water, like the breweries, food processors, and what was left of the city’s tanning industry.
The sewerage district – which suburban officials argued was dominated by city representatives – decided to charge communities based on property value. The suburbs sued to break away from the district. Engineer William Mielke, whose Pewaukee firm, Ruekert & Mielke, worked for these suburbs, contends that during planning for the tunnel, the district had concealed its intentions to charge that way. “The district had a secret plan. They did a poor job of
being forthright and truthful to the public.”
The Sewer Wars slogged on for a dozen years, from the mid-1980s until the suburbs sued for peace, paying the district a $140.7 million settlement in 1996. The result miffed these communities. “It left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth,” Mielke says.
Former Brookfield Mayor Kathryn Bloomberg says the district, along with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, also committed a major error by overselling the tunnel’s promise. “They were going to operate this system with no stormwater overflows,” Bloomberg asserts. “The pipes were all going to be big enough and life was going to be wonderful.”
MMSD officials deny this. As evidence, MMSD public affairs director Bill Graffin points to a huge pile of old photocopied clippings from the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel dating back to the early ’80s. Graffin has highlighted passages in which sewerage district officials couch their promises for the tunnel’s performance. A 1982 Sentinel story speaks of reducing – not eliminating – the volume of dumped sewage by a factor of eight. In the years before and after the tunnel’s 1994 opening, Journal and Sentinel stories suggest what had become the district’s standard expectation of the project: that it would cut overflows from 50 to 60 a year to one or two.
“I’ve gone back and looked at the record,” says Seattle’s Don Theiler. “Milwaukee said they were not going to eliminate every single overflow, but would eliminate most of them. Milwaukee had to negotiate permits with the DNR. They clearly negotiated a permit that would allow for a certain number of overflows per year.”
But the cost of the project may have led people to conclude that for this much money, it would end all overflows. “It was the largest public works project ever undertaken in the state up to that point,” Theiler notes. “And there were some vocal critics who led people to believe that it was supposed to be perfect.”
The most vocal were radio hosts Belling and Charlie Sykes. But they got backing of a sort after the Journal and Sentinel merged and the daily paper began running headlines and negative stories whenever there was an overflow. Somehow the media had decided that, despite earlier stories and the permits allowed by the DNR, no overflows were supposed to occur.
The media have also attacked the district’s practice of occasionally diverting some partially treated sewage, then combining it with treated sewage, a practice called “blending.” But an independent evaluation of the district in 2003 by Theiler pointed out that blending “does not violate any permit provisions,” is widely practiced across the country, and actually enables the district to reduce the overflows of untreated sewage.
“We always thought there would be some overflows,” Shafer notes in his talk to the Brookfield retirees. “We’re allowed six CSOs a year by the federal government.”
Shafer would prefer to never use that option. But occasionally, when faced with a huge storm, the district must allow an overflow or it will back up to the only place the stinky water can go: up through the floor drains of people’s basements.
“I’ll do that to protect your basements from backups,” Shafer adds. “It’s a hard decision, but I’ll make that call any day.”
• • •
Even some of the district’s toughest critics say Shafer has transformed relations with suburban customers and other political officials. The first engineer to head the district since the mid-1980s, Shafer was promoted from within, having joined the district as director of technical services in 1998 and rising to executive director in 2002.
Even before this, Shafer had begun to win over suburban officials. In December 1998, he recalls, shortly after he came to the district, he attended a meeting of its technical advisory team – engineers from the district’s 28 communities. As he sat across the table from his fellow engineers, one of them told Shafer: “This is the meeting where we yell at you and you yell back.”
Mindful of the bad blood that still existed because of the Sewer Wars, Shafer sought common ground. “Everyone had sewers. We all wanted an improvement in the quality of the lake. We all wanted the rivers to be clean,” he recalls thinking. “Why are we arguing?”
By the time Shafer ascended to the top job, he had already laid groundwork for a much improved relationship with the suburbs. Shafer’s immediate predecessor, Anne Spray Kinney, was largely perceived as then-Mayor John Norquist’s mouthpiece at the agency – a hard-charger who blamed suburban sewer systems for much of the runoff that found its way into the sewers.
Kinney pushed suburbs to impose heavy fines on suburban homeowners whose leaky private sewer lines, known as laterals, might be contributing to huge volumes of stormwater in heavy rains. “It seemed like all the decisions were based on politics and who would pay, as opposed to what the best science is and how we can use our dollars most effectively,” says Mequon Mayor Christine Nuernberg. “She had a total lack of understanding of the difficulty of walking onto people’s property and dealing with the laterals, which they own and which we have no right to touch.”
By contrast, Shafer is seen as a collaborator and listener. “The Sewer Wars are over. We’re working with Kevin,” says Mielke.
One example: In 2002, the district changed the way it operates the Deep Tunnel so the reservoir is allowed to fill up more before releasing untreated sewage – something Mielke says he’s advocated for years. In the past, district operators would be quicker to allow an overflow early because they wanted to save room for more sewage from the suburban sanitary sewage lines. Now, says Shafer, more detailed weather forecasting and more emphasis on communication allows him to be more flexible.
“He has no reluctance to pick up the phone and call me,” says Nuernberg. “And if I call him, he returns my call promptly. And he’s pretty pragmatic, too.”
Shafer’s persuasive approach will be needed, because as the district finishes all its big-scale improvements, it will reach the limit of what technology and construction can do. The long-term solution to further pollution reductions, says Shafer, is largely low-tech. Persuading property owners to use porous materials to pave parking lots, letting rainwater soak into the ground instead of running off. Encouraging people to use rain barrels and build rooftop rain gardens to divert more stormwater from the sewer systems. Setting aside “green seams” – parcels of undeveloped land to buffer developed properties and allow runoff to be absorbed. These kinds of projects are a key part of the MMSD’s 2020 plan.
Shafer also faces legal actions that could force him to push communities in the district to make costly improvements. The Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers has sued the district over a separate category of overflows: SSOs, caused when it’s the sanitary sewer system, not the combined systems, that overflows. Unlike the combined system overflows, which are permitted up to six times a year by the DNR, SSOs are not permitted at all, although they’ve happened about 42 times in the last decade (but the total volume of overflow is a fraction of that for combined sewer overflows). While the Friends calls them “illegal,” MMSD counters that they don’t violate its permit if used to prevent property damage and no “feasible” alternatives exist.
Even though they aren’t connected to storm sewers, deteriorating sanitary sewers can get filled up with stormwater. And the Deep Tunnel system is used to hold excess from both systems. Deciding which to give preference to can be a difficult judgment call: It depends on shifts in the weather and how accurately those shifts may be forecast.
“MMSD has gotten better at understanding how these systems work together and how to manipulate them,” says Peter McAvoy of the Sixteenth Street Health Center. This, coupled with additions to Deep Tunnel capacity, has reduced overflows, McAvoy says.
Not enough for the Friends, however.“MMSD has made some improvements,” Friends’ attorney Karen Schapiro says. “But it hasn’t done enough to curb sanitary sewer overflows. We’re looking to require them to comply with the Clean Water Act – just like every other industrial user and municipality is doing.”
She wants the district to reduce those leaks across the system – including in the suburban sewer systems the district itself does not directly control. Cheryl Nenn, who works for the Friends as “Milwaukee Riverkeeper,” warns that MMSD must “force the municipalities to deal with that issue.”
It remains to be seen if the Friends’ federal lawsuit succeeds. An earlier attempt was thrown out by Judge Charles Clevert, but Schapiro has appealed that ruling and has filed a second, separate suit.
Meanwhile, the district is the subject of another lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Department of Justice under then-Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager against both the district and all of its member communities in the aftermath of a series of overflows that followed 19 days of rain in May 2004.
In December 2005, Lautenschlager and the communities – but not the district – settled. As part of the settlement, the suburbs and Milwaukee promised to make a number of improvements to their individual sewer lines.
In response, the village of Elm Grove went on a repair binge. “We have sealed every single manhole in our system,” says Village President Neil Palmer. “Are we leakproof? No.” But the difference between normal sewage flow and the peak in times of heavy weather “is better than most of the other communities.”
Palmer says Elm Grove’s improvements will likely cost millions of dollars. Multiply that by all the other communities and the cost is likely to skyrocket to as much as $400 million by one MMSD estimate. “Some communities are going to get a horrible awakening,” Palmer notes.
Yet, even after communities address that issue, it won’t end all the overflows, nor assure that pollution of the lake and rivers won’t occur. The time is coming, Palmer and other officials say, when additional spending by either MMSD or its member communities is unlikely to yield more than small, incremental improvements. Milwaukee’s system is already better than in most metro areas, and it will never be perfect.
“There’s a disconnect between what people would like and what they’re willing to pay for,” says Mequon’s Nuernberg. “People want clean water. But on the other side of the equation, they feel their taxes are too high. To be able to spend the amount of money necessary to never, ever have an overflow is much more than what we already spend.”
“Clean water,” Nuernberg warns, “is very expensive.”
Erik Gunn is a frequent contributor to Milwaukee Magazine.Write to him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
