The MDC Clean Water Project has arrived in the West End of Hartford. Over the past few weeks engineering firm Tetra Tech Rizzo has been going door-to-door to map the manner in which sewer and storm water exits individual homes. This is the first step in the process that will eventually reduce (eliminate?) the dramatic amount of untreated wastewater that flows directly into the environment. The About the Project page states that “The existing sewage systems … release more than 1 billion gallons of wastewater to area waterways.”
When the Tetra Tech Rizzo representative arrives, the first thing they’ll want to do is get into the basement to sketch out the location of all the sewer and drainage lines within the property. Most West End homes have multiple lines running down from the upper floors, and the surveyor needs to identify the points where they go under the foundation with some precision. This step takes about 30 minutes on average, and will vary depending on the size of the home and the amount of stuff stored in the basement. Once they know where the different discharges leave the house, the engineers back at the office can (in theory) use city data sources to figure out how the lines get out to the street.
The second activity at each home is to determine where the storm water goes, which is usually just looking at what happens at the bottom of the gutter downspouts. Seeing it shot into the yard makes life easy for the MDC since they know it is not going directly into the sewer. However, if a downspout feeds into a pipe, then it may be going back inside the home and into the sewer system. That’s more difficult to determine, and over the long term will need to be changed.
The MDC Clean Water Project is scheduled to take a number of years, with everything complete by 2020. That sounds like a long time, but the existing water and sewer systems date back to the 1850s; what’s another decade?
For more information, check out page 9 of this presentation, given in March of 2010, which shows the 5 main areas of the initial sewer separation portion of the project. Most of the work is in Hartford, but the Farmington Avenue area crosses the City’s border into West Hartford. The broad areas are divided into 44 individual projects that are on separate timelines. Preliminary designs are complete for all of the projects though only 15 are in the active design phase and 5 are in construction. Check back with the Clean Water Project website periodically to get an update on their progress, the Presentations section seems to be updated most frequently.