Prompt entry #5

In my research about Nine Mile Run, I discovered that most of Pittsburgh relies on a combined sewage system that links the pipelines that handle the city's sewage with the city's storm drains. Given that Pittsburgh is most known for its defining rivers and it wildly hilly landscape, I'm coming to realize how important that little feature is. Since I first encountered Pittsburgh in person, I've been taken with its dynamic hills and its prominent rivers, but there's a stark realization that goes along with those attractive geological features. The biggest issue is that the sharp hills around the city mean that when it rains, the watersheds have a lot of water to deal with very quickly compared to more level landscapes with comparable rainfall. The problem is this: when it rains around Pittsburgh, the rapid rise and fall of the surrounding land means that water is conducted quickly into storm drains and down into the rivers because the inclines give it less time to sit on the surface and be absorbed into the ground. As a personal anecdote, I recall two years ago being nearly swept away by the torrent that was raging down South Braddock Avenue in Edgewood the evening of a particularly heavy rain. The rainfall didn't have much of a chance to soak into the ground before it was drawn downhill by gravity, creating a surging current down a major street. The same thing has happened before and flooded the Steel Plaza and Wood Street stations of Pittsburgh's downtown trolley line.

The issue becomes that the physical features of the city cause even average rainfall to be rushed into the rivers and the city's storm drains which fill too quickly and combine with the city's untreated sewage. That overflow spills into the current of the storm drains and ends up in tributary creeks like Nine Mile Run and all spills into the rivers for which Pittsburgh is so well known. When it rains, this city practically empties its collective bowels into the rivers, and this has been going on since the pipes were lain. I've thought about how to write lyrically about this, but it's frankly just disgusting. How do we write lyrically about a combined sewage system that causes untreated human waste to spill into natural waterways with even 1/10th of an inch of rainfall? Only so many limericks can be written before it just gets sad, and that's what we have: a sad, sorry, disgusting mess of a sewage system. It gets hard to flush a toilet now, knowing that if it starts to rain, I might as well be pissing straight into the rivers themselves.

Our combined system runs pipes directly into the major rivers and any above-ground stream they can reach in order to have a place to finally send the storm drain run-off. If you take a walk around the neighborhood of Shadyside, you can spot a distinct white spray-painted profile of a fish on manhole covers along the road that says "No Dumping. Drains Directly to River," as though the fish image counteracts the run-off of motor oil, litter, and other unnatural detritus that gets washed into the drains and shuffled straight into the rivers. If we don't notice it affecting us directly, it sure as hell has an effect on the ecosystems downstream, down river, down into the Gulf of Mexico and the greater global Ocean. Disgusting. Exasperating. Self-evidently ruinous, and yet it doesn't get changed because it's too damn expensive to re-design the entire city's sewage and storm drain system. Where do we even begin to try to point out the absurdity of the system's design? If it isn't already apparent how silly it is to let a little rain in a hilly region result in tons of raw sewage being dumped into natural waterways, then what can I say to make it sound silly? maybe I should start writing limericks after all.