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.

A very important part of the sewage treatment process is "pretreatment" where industrial dischargers to our sewer systems either treat their waste before discharging to the sewer system or transport their most toxic waste products to other facilities for treatment so as not to cause damage to the treatment plants themselves or cause environmental impairment to our surface waters. Often funding for monitoring and enforcement of facilities discharging to sewer systems that require pretreatment is inadequate or lacking.

Here in Milwaukee, our sludge is made into "Milorganite" (stands for Milwaukee organic nitrogen), which is a low phosphorus, "natural" fertilizer that is used extensively in the Milwaukee area as well as sold throughout the country. Last weekend, it was found that fertilizer applied to isolated areas in 5 different Milwaukee County Parks on July 5th was contaminated with PCBs.

I had a close friend here in Milwaukee who got really sick this summer from swimming in the lake while sailing after a dry weather overflow. She had no idea an overflow event had even occurred. This is pretty commonplace, and unfortunately, it's really difficult to correlate sewage overflows with illnesses contracted by recreational use, because so few people seek medical attention or make the connection that the water made them sick. There's a huge need to study that connection, but the records pretty much don't exist.

That's why the study we [Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers and the Emergency Department, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin] focused on the drinking water connection, which freaked everyone out. It is highly likely that many of the kids in our study could have gotten sick from recreational use as well. We weren't able to isolate their exposure, but the hospital is now using questionnaires so we can try to get at that question in the future.

Pediatrics, a peer reviewed medical journal, recently published an article on our study of increased visits to a pediatric emergency room for gastrointestinal illnesses after releases of partially treated, or "blended" sewage, here in Milwaukee.

Here's the abstract of the report as it appeared in the journal Pediatrics.