Recently, it came to the attention of the EPA that the Delaware County Regional Water Quality Control Authority (DELCORA) has breached the Clean Water Act with excess sewage overflow due to its combined sewer overflow into the Delaware River and its branches.
In order to solve this problem, the EPA and DELCORA have agreed on a settlement to carry out an overflow control plan that complies with the Clean Water Act and will greatly benefit the communities that have previously had extremely polluted water.
These same communities have been applauded for their ability to effectively plan long term to protect their water.
The EPA reports:
“This important agreement will protect residents from sewers that discharge raw sewage and other contaminants into local waterways,” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Cruden for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “It is the latest in a series of settlements with municipalities across the country to address aging and inadequate sewer infrastructure, particularly in older communities where residents have had to deal with sewer overflows for generations. Agreements like this one are a victory for environmental justice.”
The settlement stands to address longstanding problems with DELCORA’s combined sewer system, which when inundated with stormwater, discharges raw sewage, industrial waste, nitrogen, phosphorus, and polluted stormwater into Chester Creek, Ridley Creek, and the Delaware River. According to DELCORA, the volume of combined sewage that overflows from the system is approximately 739 million gallons annually.”
It is always a good thing when the local water authorities and the federal government can work together in a way that benefits everyone, as this example from Pennsylvania shows.
Effective infrastructure asset management requires long-term planning to deal with network management, upgrading, and maintenance issues.
Problems that have been 100 or more years in the making, coupled legal requirements to upgrade to modern environmental standards are very hard for communities to resolve in short time periods.
Using modern infrastructure management tools and techniques will aid communities in defining, analyzing and resolving these types of infrastructure issues.
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