Thoughts on Nine Mile Run

I can’t shake that unfortunate image of a manhole cover caked in toilet paper.

I went back to Nine Mile Run this afternoon, wondering what the trail might look like after the rain we’ve had over the past few days.

The tour Sarah gave us sparked an idea for a piece. I’ve been researching the history of Pittsburgh’s sewers in light of Sheryl’s comment about how we’re still dealing with the repercussions of our bad decisions. It turns out that like lots of other cities, Pittsburgh is now asking the same question it asked itself over a hundred years ago. We answered it incorrectly back then, and as much as I’d like to think we’ve learned from that mistake, things don’t look all that reassuring.

Here’s what happened.

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It’s 1873. The Monongahela River creeps westward, slow and thick and congealing brown, bunching over pipes, scraping along crusty banks, struggling like blood through a jammed artery. A few miles to the north, the Allegheny River does the same. Up and down the Ohio Valley, pipes pump into the rivers and pipes pump out. The sewage of three hundred and fifty thousand people chokes the intake valves, which pump drinking water into the city.

           

The young sewer system doesn’t work all that well. Cesspools and privy vaults overflow, rising in backyards and basements, slinking into the neighborhoods and streets. “In warm weather, many parts of the East End are absolutely unfit for habitation,” one complaint reads, “owing to the polluted atmosphere arising from open runs of filth of every description.” The excruciating smell hangs in the smoke that never seems to clear, a sour viscosity that pools on the tongue and burns behind the eyes.

A few miles away in the South Side, conditions are even worse. The soil—saturated year-round with human excrement—bubbles and belches. Noxious gas lingers over steep slopes, seeping into walls, blankets, and pores. Men and women with bleeding noses stumble through narrow, sewage-slick streets, dizzy and coughing, their skin spotted red beneath their clothes. In the cramped rooms above, workers speak Italian and Polish and German, tending to loved ones bathed in sweat, madness rising in their third or fourth weeks of fever as they approach their disease’s breaking point—the moment at which a person either begins to get better or slips into what’s known as a typhoid state, a period of motionless purgatory when eyes close halfway and death waits at the threshold.

This scene repeats itself thousands of times until one in six Pittsburghers has typhoid fever. For every 100,000 residents, over 130 die of typhoid—the highest mortality rate in the country, more than twice that of the next-highest city (Washington, D.C. at 60 deaths per 100,000.) A minimum of four people die every month, but the polluted water kills somebody, on average, every other day.

The city decides, after about 30 years of this, that it needs a better sewer system. Physicians and engineers, however, can’t agree on which system is better. Physicians want a separate system: one set of pipes for sewage, another for stormwater. Engineers argue that it’s easier and more cost-effective to build a combined sewer system—to flush the city through a single set of pipes.

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The question, then, was this: is it better to spend big now and reap the benefits in the long term? Or is it better to do what’s most economical now and then deal with problems later?

Since you saw this, you already know which option the city chose. I’m oversimplifying, of course—Pittsburgh didn’t have much money to spend, microbiology was still in its infancy, etc.—but in the end, doesn’t everything come down to cost vs. benefit, short-term vs. long-term?

Today the EPA is forcing ALCOSAN to cut back on CSOs like the one we saw. ALCOSAN submitted a plan to the government, which ignored green solutions to the problem (rain gardens, permeable pavement, etc.) in favor of cheaper, easier “gray” solutions. So here we are asking ourselves that question again—should we invest in ourselves now, or put yet another patch on the problem?

                       

The answer, as usual, has to be somewhere in between. There are real complexities and restraints that will always prevent us from a perfect solution. The good news is that the government rejected ALCOSAN’s plan as not doing enough to solve the sewage problem. What’s less clear, though, is whether we’re really willing—as a city, as a state, as a nation—to commit to what works, even if the price tag scares us.

On a side note, here’s a cool song (and video) that I think fits the spirit of the class. Also some links below if you want to read more about what's going on. 

 A comprehensive article from the City Paper that looks at the pollution problem.

A starting point for green vs. gray solutions.

A local organization that's working on this.