Decentralized wet weather overflow event

Sanitary sewer overflow (SSO} is a condition whereby untreated sewage is discharged into the environment, escaping wastewater treatment. This situation, also known as Wet Weather Overflow, is primarily meaningful in developed countries, which have extensive sewage treatment facilities. The main causes of SSO are: Sewage treatment is the process that removes the majority of the contaminants from waste-water or sewage and produces both a liquid effluent suitable for disposal to the natural environment and a sludge. ... A developed country is a country that has achieved (currently or historically) a high degree of industrialization, and which enjoys the higher standards of living which wealth and technology make possible. ...

• Infiltration of excessive stormwater into sewer lines during heavy rainfall
• Rupture or blockage of sewerage lines
• Malfunction of pumping station lifts or electrical power failure
• Human operator error at treatment plant facilities

Since a number of countries have essentially 100 percent treatment of domestic wastewater, an SSO episode is viewed as a significant breakdown in environmental control of water resources; for example, the USA, Japan, The United Kingdom and some other European countries strive for complete secondary treatment of all effluent and pursue vigourously shortcomings in the sewerage systems. See: espionage, urban exploration, entryism, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. ... Storm water is a term used by engineers to describe precipitation. ... In meteorology, precipitation is any kind of water that falls from the sky as part of the weather. ... The word sewerage means the provision of pipes etc to collect and dispose of sewage. ... Pumping station Van Sasse in Grave, the Netherlands Pumping stations are buildings designed to hold pumps and equipment for pumping fluids from one place to another. ... A power outage is the loss of the electricity supply to an area. ... The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a country in western Europe, and a member of the European Union. ... In the context of creating Plutonium at the Hanford Site, effluent refers to the cooling water that is discharged from a nuclear reactor that may or may not be radioactive. ...

History

Sewage treatment plant used to create the Wonga Wetlands, Australia

Since medieval times rulers have been aware of the impact of raw sewage improperly discharged to the environment. Before treatment systems existed in 16th century England, King Henry VIII decreed that sewage troughs should be kept flowing so that they would not stagnate in London prior to reaching the River Thames. It was not until the 19th century when America and parts of Europe developed wastewater treatment, that the concept of SSO materialized; however, communities were merely happy to have wastewater treatment systems, and did not complain greatly about overflows until the dawning of 20th century environmental awareness in the 1960s. At that time the USA began recognizing locations and frequencies of SSOs in a systematic way. Local governments heard complaints of citizens, beach closure protocols were systemaized and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began detailed engineering analyses for major cities across the country. After passage of the U.S. Clean Water Act, the 1980s saw spending of billions of dollars on system upgrading. In the 1990s the UK, Japan and a number of European countries began earnest investigation of some of their countries’ overflow issues. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1600x1067, 470 KB) Wonga Wetlands Sewage Plant File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Sewage treatment Categories: ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1600x1067, 470 KB) Wonga Wetlands Sewage Plant File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Sewage treatment Categories: ... ... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: Multiple unofficial anthems Capital London Largest city London Official language(s) English Government Constitutional monarchy  - Queen Queen Elizabeth II  - Prime Minister Tony Blair MP Unification    - by Athelstan AD927  Area    - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK)   50,346 sq mi   - Water (%) Population... Henry VIII King of England and Ireland by Hans Holbein the Younger His Grace King Henry VIII (28 June 1491–28 January 1547) was King of England and Lord of Ireland (later King of Ireland) from 22 April 1509 until his death. ... London (pronounced ) is the capital city of England and of the United Kingdom. ... The Thames (pronounced []) is a river flowing through southern England and connecting London with the sea. ... The Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C.A. § 1251 et seq. ...

Magnitude of the problem

The United States Government has set a goal of upgrading every municipal treatment and collection system such that an overflow event would be expected in any given community no more frequently than every five years. Costs to achieve this goal approximate 88 billion dollars. This cost is in addition to approximately ten billion dollars already invested in the USA. Although the volume of untreated sewage discharged to the environment is less than .01 percent of all treated sewage in the USA, the total volume amounts to several billion gallons per annum and accounts for thousands of cases of gastrointestinal illness each year^[1]. Advanced European countries and Japan have similar or somewhat larger percentages of SSO events.

Engineering aspects

Sanitary sewer line in Paris more than two meters in diameter.

By far the most prevalent cause of Sanitary Sewer Overflow stems from heavy rainfall events which can cause massive infiltration of stormwater into sewerage lines. This circumstance is most prevalent in older cities whose subsurface infrastructure is quite old; Paris^[2], London, Stockholm^[3], New York and Oakland, California^[4] are typical examples of such locations. Inflow into the sanitary lines can be caused by tree root rupture of subsurface lines or by mechanical fracture due to age and overpressure from trucks and buildings above. City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Coordinates : Time Zone : CET (GMT +1) Administration Subdivisions 20 arrondissements Département Paris (75) Région ÃŽle-de-France Mayor Bertrand Delanoë (PS) City (commune) Characteristics Land Area 86. ... In meteorology, precipitation is any kind of water that falls from the sky as part of the weather. ... Storm water is a term used by engineers to describe precipitation. ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Coordinates : Time Zone : CET (GMT +1) Administration Subdivisions 20 arrondissements Département Paris (75) Région ÃŽle-de-France Mayor Bertrand Delanoë (PS) City (commune) Characteristics Land Area 86. ... London (pronounced ) is the capital city of England and of the United Kingdom. ... Stockholm panorama from the City Hall (IPA: ; UN/LOCODE: SE STO) is the capital of Sweden, and consequently the site of its Government and Parliament as well as the residence of the Swedish head of state, King Carl XVI Gustaf. ... Official language(s) English de facto Capital Albany Largest city New York City Area  Ranked 27th  - Total 54,520 sq mi (141,205 km²)  - Width 285 miles (455 km)  - Length 330 miles (530 km)  - % water 13. ... Oakland, founded in 1852, is a major American city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in Northern California in the United States. ...

Other modes of system failure can include power outage which may disable lift station pumps or parts of the treatment plant operations themselves; in fact, any mechanical system failure within a treatment plant can create a circumstance leading to overflow: breakdown of rotating arms of trickling filters, jamming of line gates, clogging of filters or grates etc. Furthermore, some forms of human error can infrequently lead to diversion of sewage and result in an overflow event. This page may meet Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ...

Decentralized failures in dry weather mainly occur from collection sewer line blockages, which can arise from a debris clog, line rupture or tree root intrusion into the line itself. One of the main problems of a decentralized line failure is the difficulty of defining the location of overflow, since a typical urban system contains thousands of miles of collection pipage, and the central treatment plant has no way of communicating with all the lines, unless expensive monitoring equipment has been installed. Debris (French, pronounced (IPA) dibri) is a word used to describe the remains of something that has been otherwise destroyed. ...

Human health and ecological consequences

Human health impacts include significant numbers of gastrointestinal illness each year, although death from one overflow event is uncommon. Additional human impacts include beach closures, swimming restrictions and prohibition against consumption of certain aquatic animals (particularly certain molluscs) after overflow events. Ecological consequences include fish kills, harm to plankton and other aquatic microflora and microfauna. Turbidity increase and dissolved oxygen decrease in receiving waters can lead to accentuated effects beyond the obvious pathogenic induced damage to aquatic ecosystems. It is possible that higher life forms such as marine mammals can be affected since certain seals and sea lions are known to experience peaks in pathogenic harm^[5] For the Physics term GUT, please refer to Grand unification theory The gastrointestinal or digestive tract, also referred to as the GI tract or the alimentary canal or the gut, is the system of organs within multicellular animals which takes in food, digests it to extract energy and nutrients, and... 90 mile beach Australia A beach or strand is a geological formation consisting of loose rock particles such as sand, shingle, cobble, or even shell along the shoreline of a body of water. ... Swimming is a technique that humans, and other animals, use to move through water using only movements of the body. ... Classes Caudofoveata Aplacophora Polyplacophora - Chitons Monoplacophora Bivalvia - Bivalves Scaphopoda - Tusk shells Gastropoda - Snails and Slugs Cephalopoda - Squids, Octopuses, etc. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... A pathogen or infectious agent is a biological agent that causes disease or illness to its host. ... In ecology, an ecosystem is a combination of all the living and non-living elements of an area. ...

Worldwide perspective

Beach on Nosy Be, Madagascar immediately below treatment plant that has a power shutdown virtually nightly for about eight hours

It is difficult to visualize the issue of SSO in perspective, since underdeveloped countries discharge most of the sewage they create as effluent into the environment. Even a highly industrialized country such as The Peoples Republic of China discharges about 55 percent of all sewage without treatment of any type^[6]. In a relatively developed Middle Eastern country such as Iran, Tehran's majority of population has totally untreated sewage injected to the city’s groundwater^[7]. In Venezuela, a below average country in South America with respect to wastewater treatment, 97 percent of the country’s sewage is discharged raw into the environment^[8]. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is without wastewater treatment, leading to the excessive infant death rates in that region. 90 mile beach Australia A beach or strand is a geological formation consisting of loose rock particles such as sand, shingle, cobble, or even shell along the shoreline of a body of water. ... Nosy Be (also Nossi-bé) is an island just off the northwest coast of Madagascar. ... A power outage is the loss of the electricity supply to an area. ... The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is a communist state, comprising most of the cultural, historic, and geographic area known as China. ... A map showing countries commonly considered to be part of the Middle East The Middle East is a region comprising the lands around the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, a territory that extends from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. ... Tehran (IPA: ; Persian: تهران, also transliterated as Teheran or Tehrān), population 7,160,094 (metropolitan: 14,000,000[citation needed]), and a land area of 658 square kilometers, is the capital city of Iran and the center of Tehran Province. ... South America South America is a continent crossed by the equator, with most of its area in the Southern Hemisphere. ... Sewage is the liquid water produced by human society which typically contains washing water, laundry waste, faeces, urine and other liquid or semi-liquid wastes. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... A human infant Infant is a slightly more formal term for the word baby, the youngest category of child. ...

Thus the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan are considered struggling with a public health problem of SSO prevention, while the underdeveloped countries of the world discharge approximately 20,000 times the amount of raw sewage into the environment as those advanced countries collectively; thus, lesser developed countries discharge approximately (the equivalent of) 100 trillion gallons of untreated sewage per annum. This dichotomy of expenditure and public health benefit is arguably the greatest disparity between developed and underdeveloped nations as of the year 2006. A common understanding of Western Europe in modern times. ... Coloured world map indicating Human Development Index (as of 2003). ... Public health is concerned with threats to the overall health of a community based on population health analysis. ...

References

The Seine (pronounced in French) is a major river of north-western France, and one of its commercial waterways. ... The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) provides water and sewage treatment for customers in Alameda County and portions of Contra Costa County in California, on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. ... Logo of the World Bank The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, in Romance languages: BIRD), better known as the World Bank, is an international organization whose original mission was to finance the reconstruction of nations devastated by WWII. Now, its mission has expanded to fight poverty by means... Tehran (also spelled Teheran) (تهران in Persian), population 8,000,000 (metropolitan: 10,000,000), is the capital of Iran and one of the major world cities. ... World map depicting Caribbean: West Indies redirects here. ...

See also

• Intestinal parasite
• Water crisis
• Water pollution

Intestinal parasites are parasites that populate the gastro-intestinal tract. ... A third of the worlds countries are now water stressed as one in five people (1. ... Water pollution Water pollution is a large set of adverse effects upon water bodies (lakes, rivers, oceans, groundwater) caused by human activities. ...

External links

• Environmental Protection Agency Report to Congress, 2000
• California State Water Quality Control Board SSO Guidance
• Seine River sewage discharge scenario