Our Water – A Common Good to Protect
By Cynthia Sommer
For many in the US, the smart phone, internet and cable are deemed essential for life. But on honest reflection, they do not come close to our need for clean water for survival. The citizens of Milwaukee are fortunate to have Lake Michigan and rivers as sources of fresh water but water sources are not the same as clean water. The issues of repeated typhoid and cholera epidemics, sewage handling in early Milwaukee history, polluted rivers flushed into Lake Michigan, the Cryptosporidium outbreak in 1993, lead in lateral water lines, and overflows of the Deep Tunnel with heavy rains are reminders that clean water requires continued diligence. Throughout history and to the present, there has been a constant need to keep our waters clean and safe for all citizens.
In the 19th century, the lack of knowledge about the causes of disease, the influx of large numbers of immigrants, and contamination of water supplies with sewage resulted in high rates of diarrheal diseases, especially typhoid fever and cholera. Epidemics of cholera swept through Milwaukee from 1832-34 and again from 1849-54. An excavation for an addition to the Maryland Avenue School in 1951 uncovered hastily buried human remains from the 1849-50 cholera outbreak. Newspapers of the time of the epidemic reported a need for constant funds to the “almshouse committee” to have the hundreds of corpses hauled away and buried. Sisters of Charity nuns were invited in 1848 by Milwaukee Bishop Henri to help those suffering from these diseases. The City of Milwaukee granted them for their service, especially for their work in the 1849,’50 and ’54 cholera epidemics, a three-acre tract of land near the potters’ field at North Point that became St. Mary’s Hospital and now is Columbia-St. Mary’s Hospital (CSM).
Demands for housing, water and sewage service surged from 1880-1920 with the influx of immigrants. White collar workers and those with more wealth were attracted to Milwaukee’s Eastside (Ward 18), because of its proximity to the Lake, access to parks, street car routes and larger lots. In contrast to many other parts of the city, the Eastside developers invested in the extra cost of water and sewage piping because they expected to recoup installation costs and more from the increased property values. It is documented that for Ward 18 the mean year of installation for water mains and sewer pipes was 1893. Unfortunately for some of the south side Polish neighborhoods, it took three more decades and the election of the Socialist City government concerned about public health to provide them with water and sewer lines.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, changes did occur in the City’s water and sewage system but only after public outcries, major epidemics, lawsuits, and contamination of our rivers and Lake Michigan. In 1874 Milwaukee’s cisterns, wells and water carts were replaced with the first water system providing clear Lake Michigan water through underground pipes. The City charged homeowners a minimum of $4 a year for the use of water but that price was still too expensive for many struggling immigrants. The sewage system developed at that time emptied into the City’s three rivers that soon became a “huge cesspool” and produced “unbearable stench to the nostrils”. It took another 10 years before the city built flushing tunnels that directed the waste from the worst rivers to Lake Michigan. The stonewall pumping station at Northpoint near Lafayette (now Colectivo Coffee Lakefront) cleared the filth from the Milwaukee River but directed its plume of sewage directly into Lake Michigan and with strong winds into the city’s water intake pipe. They addressed one problem and created several others.
It took until 1910, three decades later, before the city started disinfecting water with hypochlorite of lime to minimize disease outbreaks. The construction by 1925 of the Jones Island Treatment Plant, a state of the art facility that used activated sludge for processing sewage, significantly controlled but did not eliminate all sewage problems. The Great Depression delayed construction of the first water filtration plant at Linnwood and Lake Drive until 1939. The building of a second water filtration plant on the south side in 1962 and the South Shore Sewage treatment plant in Oak Creek in 1968 supplemented the Greater Milwaukee needs. But not all pollution issues were addressed.
Over several decades, the continued expansion of the metropolitan sewage district area put demands on storm and sanitary sewage processing, and concerns were raised about sewage overflow into Lake Michigan. The Clean Water Act of 1972 and lawsuits by Illinois and Michigan resulted in costly construction (1994, 2007) of the Deep Tunnel System to address the problem of overflows of sewage into Lake Michigan.
Milwaukeeans had a crude awakening from a half a century of clean water safely provided by the chlorination and filtration processes. In March 1993, over 400,000 Milwaukeeans experienced severe diarrhea cause by an intestinal microbe, Cryptosporidium, which was resistant to chlorination. After much recrimination and public debate, both water filtration plants were modified with redesigned filtration systems and the use of ozone as a disinfectant.
Milwaukee created a model drinking water system after the Cryptosporidium outbreak, developed at the Jones Island Plant the first activated sludge sewage processing system in the US and spent billions to build the Deep Tunnel to abate pollution of Lake Michigan, but lessons from the past tell us that we must be ever diligent. There is much that each of us can do – minimize plastic bottle usage; properly process outdated medicines; use recyclable materials; pick up litter; create rain gardens and green roofs; disconnect our roof downspouts from combined sanitary sewers to minimize overflow during heavy rains; petition our legislators to address aging infrastructure; and support water issues. Let us remember that water is a common good that each of us needs to protect.