To avoid catastrophic failure, Baltimore sewer line needs $11 million in emergency repairs

Last May, Mayor Brandon Scott and Council President Nick Mosby hailed the $ 430 million expansion of Back River’s main sewage treatment facility as key to ending raw sewage overflow and complying with the 1972 Clean Water Act.

“Headworks is a turning point for the Baltimore area,” said the Mayor as he stood at the Dundalk facility with other dignitaries.

Tomorrow, Scott and Mosby will be asked to provide emergency funding to repair a badly damaged 117-year-old pipe that is threatening to disrupt costly improvements in the city by feeding the new headboards.

Ulliman Schutte Construction will receive an “emergency procurement” of $ 10.7 million to begin repairing the pipe and an additional $ 300,000 will go to KCI Technologies to provide inspection services.

The costs are shared equally between Baltimore City, which owns the system, and Baltimore County, which it uses to treat its wastewater.

According to material submitted to the appraisal committee and reviewed by The Brew, part of the 11 by 12 foot brick-lined pipe – that runs under Eastern Avenue from President Street on Inner Harbor to the sewage treatment plant near Eastpoint Mall – “fails” and “requires immediate attention”.

As the main line that carries sewage from 1.3 million customers in the east of the city and county, “any failure of this line will lead to a sewage overflow into the environment” and “harm the common good,” the documents say.

Throttle point

Dammed sewage flowing into apartment basements as well as Jones Falls and the Inner Harbor is a decade-old problem.

Climate change has compounded the impact with increased rainfall entering sewers and sometimes flooding them.

The superstructure project, one of the most expensive public works in the city’s history, nearly doubled the capacity of the Back River plant to accommodate heavy inflows during storms.

The system’s throttling point, however, remains the Eastern Avenue Pipe, which was built in 1904 and has not seen any significant repairs since then.

The arched tunnel carries more than 150 million gallons of wastewater to the Back River facility every day – an amount that can easily triple in a major storm surge.

In the original, unchanged design, the wastewater is held behind an underground dam at the entrance to the wastewater treatment plant until the wastewater treatment plant can treat it.

A tank in the Back River sewage treatment plant that settles the dirt and debris that comes with the sewage of 1.3 million customers. (Markus Reutter)

2022 deadline

When storms occur, sewage accumulates for miles under Eastern Avenue and sometimes collects so much pressure that it breaks out of manhole covers on the street or gushes out of basement toilets, sometimes miles away.

Under a consent decree signed by Mayor Martin O’Malley with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) in 2002, the city pledged to end the raw sewage overflow by 2012.

Failing to meet this deadline, the city won several extensions and eventually secured an amended agreement that allows “structured” sewage to overflow in places like Lower Falls Road near the Baltimore Streetcar Museum by July 2022.

The additional capacity of the superstructure was designed to reduce wastewater overflow by 80%, but the improved system will only work as well as the Eastern Avenue tunnel remains open and in good condition.

“No occasional repairs”

Due to sediment deposits in the pipe, EPA and MDE requested the city to inspect and clean the tunnel as part of the approval decision.

A $ 8.3 million cleanup was completed in July 2018, and a surveillance camera has since been run through the tunnel to detect cracks and break-ins.

The footage showed that “the part of the [tunnel] failed near the Back River sewage treatment plant, ”the Scott administration was told, demanding tomorrow’s emergency contract.

The work, which is expected to take 11 months, requires the rebuilding of a very old and potentially dangerous tunnel. “This is not a casual repair,” warned a former top official in the Department of Public Works today.

“This tunnel is pretty deep. Repairing it will be complicated and dangerous, and will likely involve digging a manhole and building a cofferdam to stop the flow. Remember, the contractor will be working in the same room where tens of millions of gallons of sewage go to the treatment plant. “

Baltimore praises its Back River sewage treatment plant from 1926 when the sewer system was almost brand new.  (Public Works Department)

Baltimore praised the Back River facility in 1926 when the processing system was virtually new. (Baltimore DPW)

This is not the first time the proper maintenance of Baltimore’s wastewater infrastructure has been called into question.

Earlier this year, MDE cited the city for diverting up to 130 million gallons of partially purified wastewater daily from its Back River and Patapsco plants to Chesapeake Bay, the latter treating wastewater from the west of the city and county.

The illegal discharges were first exposed by Blue Water Baltimore, an environmental group that found high levels of bacteria in port water near the sewer pipes at the Patapsco plant.

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