NEWBURYPORT — Good news out of Lowell this month has the potential to make the water that flows by local cities and towns much cleaner.
The state announced Lowell is expected to receive $35 million in economic stimulus low-interest loans and grants to upgrade its wastewater treatment facility, and another $32 million to work on decreasing the number of "CSOs" or combined sewage overflows, triggered at their facility annually. That's great news for anyone who has ever noticed the Merrimack River change to a murky brown after a steady rain or been bothered by the fact that it's not safe after rainstorms to either swim or boat because of overflows of sewer systems upstream.
"It's a great thing," said Merrimack Valley Watershed Council's Christine Tabak of the Lowell projects.
CSO is a dirty word in the world of sewer systems. When it rains .3 inches or more, some sewage treatment plants upstream from Newburyport get overwhelmed by storm water that surges through drains. They are forced to dump raw untreated sewage and rainwater into the river.
Tabak heads up the MVWC, which is the only organization regularly monitoring and testing river quality. She said of the five cities upstream that trigger CSOs during rainstorms, Lowell is the worst offender because of its aging system of underground pipes, some of which were installed in the early 1800s. Its sewer system combines storm water runoff with waste from people's homes, as do the systems in Haverhill; Lawrence; Nashua, N.H.; and Manchester, N.H. Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell have been ordered by the DEP to work on eliminating CSOs by moving to a separate system that funnels waste and storm water through their own designated pipes. But money for the projects has been hard to come by, Tabak said.
"Lowell has been in line trying to get funding," Tabak said. "I'm really excited that they got it. Last year, Lowell was the city in which if one-third of an inch of rain fell, a CSO was triggered."
Lowell will spend $32 million of its allocated dollars on switching one of the most backed up neighborhoods in the city to a separate sewer system, which will relieve the backup in that area's pipes during rain events, said Waste Water Treatment Facility executive director Mark Young. Though it will only address CSOs at one of the eight discharge pipes where raw sewage flows after a rain, Young said this is the city's largest outflow.
"What we're trying to do is, we have a pool of money, and we're trying to do as much CSO reduction as we can with it," Young said. "This section of Lowell is one of the largest drainage areas of the city. That's one of the reasons why we're trying to do sewer separation there."
MVWC water resource manager Tracie Sales said the problem is that the lines in Lowell don't have the capacity to carry both sewage and storm water through to the wastewater treatment facility. So when heavy rains overwhelm the system, there are triggers in the line that force the untreated sewage and solids into the river, which is preferable to it backing up into people's homes.
"There's this ancient aging infrastructure, and it costs millions of dollars to dig up these systems and figure out where they're going to and then separate them," Sales said. "You're talking about tearing up streets, disrupting traffic and all those things people don't want to deal with."
And then there's the money involved. Tabak said a recent study performed by the five communities responsible for discharging CSOs into the Merrimack, with funding help from the US Army Corps of Engineers found that eradicating CSOs from the five cities would cost $500 million.
"These CSOs have a documented impact on river water quality," said Amesbury Department of Public Works director Rob Desmarais. "It's great that they're doing the work. When you think about it, it's kind of mind-boggling that it's $32 million for one outfall. If that's where they're spending their money, that's good for them, and good for us, too."
Lowell's work on CSOs has been federally mandated by court order and will continue at intervals even though there is no posted end date required for their ultimate compliance. But considering the river represents one of the quality-of-life resources of residents in riverfront communities, any step toward reducing the pollution heading downstream is good news to Amesbury Mayor Thatcher Kezer.
"It's definitely a benefit because one of the best parts of Amebsury is the quality of life, largely because of the waterways that we have," Kezer said. "As they resolve (CSOs) upstream that's just better water quality for us and better quality of life in Amesbury."
Kezer recalls a time when the river was much worse off than it is today.
"Its existence was part of the industrial development of the region," Kezer said. "All the waste going back a couple of centuries — the river was the means to dispose of that waste. We are now paying the cost that the whole industrial age benefited from."
Sales agrees, and she sympathizes with communities like Lowell, Haverhill and Lawrence, which have to pay the highest price of fixing their aging infrastructures with limited funds.
"There is simply a very limited amount of money for separating the systems," Sales said. "They are trying their absolute hardest to make the water that comes out of their plants as clean as they possibly can, but they're working under limited funding with ancient systems, and there's only so much they can do."
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