Miller Park Home of the Milwaukee Brewers: Photo:http://flickr.com/photos/leathtech

It's one thing for the Milwaukee Brewers, the perennial doormat of the National League Central division, to stink up the field with terrible pitching and hitting. But it's downright criminal for them to also stink up the Menomonee River and Lake Michigan with raw sewage. On Thursday, March 14, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that evidence from dye testing procedures carried out by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewer District showed that sewer lines coming from sinks and toilets in Miller Park, home of the Brewers, discharged directly into the Menomonee River.

"The improper connection allows human fecal bacteria from bathrooms on the northeast corner of the stadium to flow into the river...‘One or more of the sanitary sewer pipes coming from that corner of the stadium likely was connected inadvertently to a storm sewer during Miller Park's construction,' said Peter Topczewski, the sewerage district's water quality protection manager."

Three days later the Journal-Sentinel printed a follow-up story saying that the two problem areas discovered during the original dye test had been fixed.

"Dye tests of sanitary sewers on the north side of the stadium late last week confirmed the pair of problems had been found and corrected," said Mike Duckett, executive director of the Miller Park stadium district. "The fix ended several years of pollution of the river and Lake Michigan from that storm sewer."

"Several years of pollution"!!! Wait, wait, wait... So in other words authorities are just now getting around to finding the root of a problem that has led to untold gallons of untreated sewage to be dumped into the Menomonee River and Lake Michigan for the last six years (Miller Park opened in 2001) and it took just two days fix! I don't know about you but if I had a leaky sewage line in the basement of my house I probably wouldn't wait SIX YEARS to find and fix the problem.

According to the March 17 article, more testing is scheduled to be done to make sure that the entire problem is solved and to discover if there are more misconnected pipes in the stadium.

I contacted Cheryl Nenn, the Milwaukee Riverkeeper, to get her thoughts on the problem at Miller Park and here's just some of what she had to say:

"The Great Lakes Water Institute has recently confirmed bacteria from human feces in many local areas -- in fact, human bacteria was found at 27 or 45 storm sewer pipes that have been tested thus far. Miller Park is the first of many such locations where we need to find where the human sewage is coming from. In the case of Miller Park, the good news is that we know where the problem is and can address it.

In other areas, it is much more difficult to find where the human sewage is coming from. In some locations, even extensive testing has not helped. For example, at one site draining downstream of our State Fair Park (79th St. and Mt. Vernon on Honey Creek), the City has done past testing (although not specifically for human bacterial indicators) and has been unable to find a source for the problem. Many of these pipes drain huge areas of residential homes, and even though dye testing and televising has been done of many of the municipal pipes, they still can't find the smoking gun so to speak.

We have people fishing, paddling, and in some cases, swimming in sewage. It's unacceptable. We feel that Miller Park should be held accountable for these "errors", and invest in improving the river that they have been polluting over the last several years. Yes, that was my attempt to use a baseball analogy."

For those of you not familiar, Milwaukee has quite a history of problems with sewage so I'm absolutely sure we'll be hearing more from Cheryl in the future.

I can't help but imagine... What if Miller Park had been designed like AT&T Park (formerly Pac Bell Park), home of the San Francisco Giants? There the deep home runs often sail out of the stadium and into a spot in the San Francisco Bay called "The Cove." At Giant's games it's pretty common for baseball fans in kayaks to paddle around The Cove in anticipation of scooping the occasional water logged souvenir out of the water. If you could do this in Milwaukee, fans would really need to watch what else they might pull out of the drink.