Spewing Out Waste Water When The Rain Comes, The Plant Gives Out And Lets It All Run . . .

. . . it’s not hard, not hard to reach, then you get E. coli at Rockaway Beach:

Besides flooding subways, the wild downpour this week provided a disconcerting glimpse into one of New York’s dirtiest environmental secrets: heavy rain regularly overwhelms the city’s vast sewage system and pushes polluted water into places it is not supposed to go.

New York has a storm water drainage system that was linked many years ago to the same pipes that carry wastes from homes and businesses. That, combined with the ever-expanding layer of asphalt and concrete that keeps rain from soaking into the ground, means that whenever it storms, some of the storm water and sewage in the 6,000 miles of sewer pipe in the city start to back up.

When that happens, millions of gallons of rainwater mixed with raw sewage are routed away from the city’s 14 sewage plants and toward a web of underground pipes that empty directly into the East River, the Hudson River and New York Harbor.

The backups could also prevent water from being drained from subway tunnels.

These events — called combined sewer overflows — have been recognized as a major environmental problem for decades. The city has been dealing with the issue in response to orders from the state and the federal government, but still has a long way to go.

. . .

On a dry day, the Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the system, normally treats about 1.4 billion gallons of sewage at 14 plants spread throughout the city. But because storm water runoff flows through the same pipes, each plant has been equipped with enough capacity to handle double its ordinary load on rainy days.

But as little as a tenth of an inch of rain coming very quickly can overload that system. A series of devices called regulators that are buried deep in the ground automatically respond to pressure from the extra water by diverting the flow away from the treatment plants to nearly 460 registered sewage outflows that empty directly into the city’s rivers and waterways.

New York has a long history of using its waterways as dumps. Until the late 1980s, the city routinely poured untreated sewage into the harbor; in 1992, it became the last city in the country to halt the practice of dumping sewage sludge at sea.

Like, ew.