Downstream neighbors pooh-pooh Atlanta’s sewer system

• Maggie Lee
• Jacqueline Echols, right, president of the South River Watershed Alliance, says Atlanta’s sewage sometimes washes into her river. She and others picketed the federal Environmental Protection Agency last week to pressure them to put a stop to it.

For the first time in 10 years, environmental rule-writers are reconsidering just how much Atlanta sewage should be allowed to wash downstream toward neighbors in DeKalb and beyond. It should be pretty much zero, activists say. Not gonna happen, says the city.

What Atlanta has now is a “third-world approach” toward sewage disposal, said Jacqueline Echols, president of the South River Watershed Alliance. The South River starts in East Point and flows through Atlanta, south DeKalb County, and points southeast before emptying into Jackson Lake.

She refers to Atlanta’s approach as such because in some of the oldest parts of the city — English Avenue and Vine City — the same set of pipes is supposed to handle both rainwater and toilet flushes. When it rains too hard, the system can’t handle everything, and some of what goes down area toilets runs into area streams without being fully treated. Running a system that allows such sewage spread shows zero respect for people on the river, Echols says.

The SRWA and some other groups are calling for environmental regulators to clamp down on pollution from sewage overflows. The state Environmental Protection Division is now in the middle of its periodic review of the pair of permits that say what Atlanta can flush westward toward the Chattahoochee and eastward toward Jackson Lake.

Echols and a dozen marchers took their “cut the crap” message to the sidewalk in front of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Atlanta office on Forsyth Street on Friday. One dressed as a giant toilet and posed for pictures.

What’s in the water is unmistakable, activists say. When the rain has been heavy enough, “people on the South River can smell what’s coming,” said Smitty Smith, from the Jackson Lake Home Owners Association. He and a handful of neighbors, plus Atlanta residents, marched with Echols on Friday. “Atlanta needs to fix it,” he said.

Atlanta has been working on the issue. After the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper sued the city in 1995, the City Hall signed agreements with the feds to reduce overflows, separate some sewers and and fix some 380 miles of sewer lines. Hundreds of millions in spending has drastically improved downstream water quality.

But the new permits, once finalized, will determine what Atlanta can still send downstream and how they will be measured for success or failure.

Environmental groups, including the Riverkeeper, say some of the definitions and monitoring instructions are unclear or inconsistent, and that the city could possibly get by with more than four overflows per year and could drag its feet in notifying the public of overflows. Intrenchment Creek could also do with stronger protections as well, suggested GreenLaw, an Atlanta legal nonprofit.

The existing permit scores the city in part by the percent reduction of what are called “total suspended solids,” or TSS: silt, clay, organic debris and other particles. The new draft permit does not.

Echols said eliminating that measurement amounts to backsliding, something a Clean Water Act permit cannot do. SRWA’s written comments to the EPD go into detail.

But Atlanta says it “appreciates” the EPD’s decision in the draft permit to discontinue measuring its performance by TSS percentages, wrote Jewanna Gaither, a spokeswoman with Mayor Kasim Reed’s office, in an e-mail to Creative Loafing. Since the upgrades, she said, Atlanta’s overflow is so much cleaner than expected that talking about a percentage requirement is not an accurate or useful indicator of how well the city scrubs its water.

“The current draft permits are more stringent than the existing permits and require substantially more monitoring and reporting than found in the current permits,” Gaither wrote.

As for the permits, the EPD is working on replying to public comments.

“After completing response to comments and any related changes to the draft permits, EPD will coordinate with U.S. EPA and then issue the final permits,” according to an e-mail from Jac Capp, Chief of the EPD Watershed Protection Branch.

There’s no set deadline for EPD and EPA to finish the permitting process.

What Echols would really like to see is the storm water separated from sewer lines.

“If you stop storm water from going into pipes, you have the problem solved,” she said.

But there’s no plan for that. Under court order, the city evaluated the idea.

“The remaining combined area is located in the dense urban core of the city and separation would require major investments, disruption of streets, and demolition of numerous buildings that were built on top of the combined sewer system throughout the 19th and 20th centuries at a time when when combined sewer systems were considered to be state-of-the-art technology in urban areas,” wrote Gaither. “Separating the system was found to be impracticable and cost prohibitive.”