Milwaukee's Sewage in Lake MichiganTwo new sewage related things: First, Josh missed a major spill in his May 11 Spill of the Week. Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers just found out on Wednesday that there was a sewage spill last week of approximately 4.1 million gallons of wastewater into Lake Michigan.

That's great public notification at the beginning of boating season. This was operator error and not due to wet weather. Interestingly, a similar incident happened last year at the same time. After both of these "operator error" spills, the Wisconsin DNR stated publicly in Journal Sentinel articles that these overflows were violations of MMSD's permit. However, no action was every taken on the spring 2006 spills (March 29, 2006 dry weather "blending" incident of close to 1M gallons).

We will be watching to see if any enforcement action is taken on this spill! There has been virtually no DNR enforcement in the last decade, leading us to file 2 separate lawsuits against MMSD: for SSOs from 1995-2001; and SSOs from 2002-2006.