For many years it has been thought that the construction of the Cumminsville connector in Winchester would solve the town's sewer surcharging problem. Surcharging if you have forgotten is when the main sewer lines going down to the Deer and Nut Island treatment plants in Boston become completely filled and pressurized and the raw sewerage starts to flow up out of the man holes and into the streets. When this happens it firsts manifests itself down in Woburn near Horn Pond. Since this is part of Woburn's main water supply you can understand why they get anxious when the first raw sewerage starts coming up out of their man holes.
They immediately get on the phone and what Burlington does to try and alleviate the flow coming out of our town into the system is to pump our raw sewerage directly into the Vine Brook from the Terrace Hall Avenue pumping station. Since we are the last town on the main trunk down to Boston this is our only alternative.
This problem has been going on for about 25 years. The town has been vexed over how to solve the problem. We instituted a very aggressive I&I program which means inflow and infiltration removal. Inflow is the illegal connecting of storm drains that allows sump pumps or roof drains to flow directly into sanitary sewer and infiltration is when ground water seeps into the system either by leaky manholes or separations in the sewer lines themselves.
This program took out large amounts of water and helped the alleviate the problem for a number of years. When the MWRA completed the new Deer Island Plant once again the town thought the problem might be cured. No, that didn't solve the problem and now after yesterday's storm we find out that Cumminsville has not done the trick either.
Watching the rains yesterday I was eager to get down to the pumping station today to see the results. Sure enough, parked right in the drive way were the big pumps with the huge flexible pipes coming out of them directly into the Vine Brook.
There will be a brief report about this in the newspaper and the town officials will say something about it being an aberration because this was a fifty or hundred year storm. Unfortunately over the past 7 or 8 years we have had 9 of those storms. Seems to me we should call them some like an every couple of year storm.
No big deal if we have to do it once in a while, what can it hurt? The answer to that is who really knows other than this, the stream that we pump this raw sewerage into goes directly into the Shawsheen River which is where we get our water to fill the reservoir. In addition the town will tell you they treat the sewerage before they dump it in the brook. That treatment consists of spray a little bit of chlorine into thousands and thousands of gallons of sewerage.
What they don't tell anyone and what I can show you in pictures is that the toilet paper and condoms and tampax that comes out of the pumps is left lying in and along the banks of the stream. They don't even bother to rake it up or clean the stream. It just lies there all year adorning the vegetation.
So the bottom line is that Cumminsville has not solved the problem and in fact it is likely to get worse for the following reasons. The largest producer of sewerage in town is the hospital and the town has allowed them to grow by 60%. On top of that, the Commons was allowed to be built with a number of new large restaurants approved. In addition the Northwest Park will now grow from 1.4 million square feet up to roughly three million square feet. In that new development is likely to be a hotel and 12 liquor licences. Hotels and restaurants are second only to hospitals in the amount of sewerage they create.
In addition to this we have similar development going on downstream which will only add to the amount of sewerage over capacity. In the old days the state solved the problem by just opening the flood gates and allowing all the sewerage at Deer Island to simply flow into Boston Harbor. This practice ended by court order when Quincy got sick of all of the stuff ending up on their beach. Perhaps a court order is what will be necessary to end the practice in Burlington.
What does it say about the people of a community who allow the practice of flushing their toilets in their drinking water source?
