Our Fight
Americans count on clean rivers for drinking water, recreation, economic livelihood and quality of life. But what lurks below the surface of the river you love?
Every single day, especially when it rains, sewage pours into our waterways. Shocking but true: Overflows of pollution from our nation’s crumbling sewer systems dump 850 billion gallons of sewage annually. It is simply unacceptable to allow raw or poorly treated human waste, laden with potentially-deadly pathogens, to enter our rivers, streams and lakes.
We need stronger laws, better enforcement and more funding to fix this problem. To achieve these goals, we need to galvanize political power. That requires increasing public awareness. This campaign centers on every citizen’s Right to Know when sewage pollutes our waters. So stand up and be counted, alongside other organizations acting for healthy rivers!
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Keep tabs on the campaign. Stay up-to-date on efforts to pass federal Right-to-Know legislation for sewage spills. Get details on what coalition members are doing to safeguard their rivers. And learn about victories in the fight against sewage pollution.
All Supporters
We are a broad-based coalition of national, state and local conservation groups striving to protect rivers from the rising tide of sewage pollution. As a crucial first step toward this goal, together we seek to win passage of legislation in the U.S. Congress that will help reduce the annual number of human illnesses and deaths from contact with sewage by requiring public notification of sewer spills and overflows into waterways.Learn About Sewage
Why is this issue so important? Because America is drowning in sewage.
Just consider:
- 40,000 raw sewage spills occur each year - more than 100 per day!
- Up to 3.5 million people who swim in this polluted water become ill each year.
- Human health toll includes infectious disease, gastrointestinal ailments, heart disease, liver and kidney failure, arthritis, memory loss, respiratory paralysis, and even cancer.
- The cost of medical care alone can reach $4 billion a year.
A variety of factors are responsible for widespread sewage pollution across the country.
- Aging infrastructure: America invested heavily in wastewater infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s, but has not kept pace with needed investments since then. The average pipe is now 33 years old and many are beginning to corrode and break.
- Development: Rapid development across the country is increasing the amount of impermeable surfaces and sending more runoff into already overburdened sewer systems. Treatment plants cannot increase capacity quickly enough to treat the waste from additional homes and must regularly release excess sewage untreated.
- Funding shortage: Despite EPA estimates of nearly $400 billion needed to remedy the shortcomings in our wastewater infrastructure, federal funding has been continually cut in recent years, leaving communities facing an annual $6 billion shortfall of funds to fix or upgrade sewage treatment facilities.
- Permit violations: Non-compliance with permit requirements is widespread and better enforcement is needed.
Learn About the Legislation
Although there are alert systems for a variety of public health threats, ranging from bad air pollution days to tainted food outbreaks, there currently are no federal requirements for wastewater treatment plants to promptly warn the public when there is a sewage spill or overflow. This is an outrage, especially since this pollution threatens the lives and health of millions of Americans. Public notification and reporting is needed so people will have the information they need to protect their families -
and the rivers they love.
Better notification, monitoring and reporting would save millions of Americans from getting sick every year. The federal legislation we seek would help reduce the annual number of human illnesses and deaths from contact with raw sewage by informing Americans of sewer overflows discharging waste into their local waterways. The bill would:
Provide notification of sewer overflows by requiring sewage treatment works to:
- Monitor their treatment works for sewage overflows by using a management program or technology that will alert them of sewer overflows in a timely manner;
- Notify the public, public health officials and other affected downstream entities including drinking water suppliers of any sewer overflows that endanger human health.
- Report to state officials or the Environmental Protection Agency on all sewer overflows as soon as practicable within 24 hours of becoming aware of the overflow and follow-up with a written report explaining the duration and volume of the overflow and steps taken to mitigate the overflow prevent recurrence.
- Authorizes millions of dollars in much-needed federal funding each year to implement the above requirements.
Join the fight for your right to know if and when your river is contaminated by sewage...and fight for the funds needed to end the dumping of raw sewage in our nation's waterways!