Organization Challenges Plans for Pittsburgh Sewer Overhaul

Past organizations have tried and failed to get ALCOSAN, the Pittsburgh region’s wastewater treatment facility, to change their plans to dig a costly tunnel system. However, that endeavor continues today with the Clean Rivers Campaign, an environmental coalition that has begun to make some headway in their cause. 

“The reason we've gotten as far as we have is that we don't think it’s a science project,” said Tom Hoffman, who is the Conservation Program Coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Pennsylvania Chapter and represents them within the Clean Rivers Campaign.

“It’s a down and dirty dog fight over three billion dollars,” he stated, referring to the projected cost of constructing a network of underground tunnels that will catch overflowing sewage, a plan that the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority currently prefers. 

Since The Clean Rivers Campaign was formed five years ago, one of its main tenants has been to get ALCOSAN to invest more money in supporting local communities. As a result, the group has been an integral part of the dialogue between city officials, ALCOSAN and Pittsburgh area residents. 

“We completely changed the discussion,” said Hoffman, adding that he believes a much larger part of the community is now supportive of solving sewer overflow issues by creating ways to prevent rainwater from entering the sewer system. 

Along with the other members of the campaign, Hoffman believes ALCOSAN’s tunnel digging project is unnecessary. In its stead, they have proposed a plan that requires repairs be made to the city’s current sewer system and the addition of green infrastructure around the city to absorb rain water before it can overflow sewers. According to Hoffman, that plan would be projected to cost around $800 million and would be more effective than the tunnels at preventing sewage from entering Pittsburgh’s rivers.

Hoffman believes previous groups went about their mission in the wrong way, building small green infrastructure projects and using them as examples to support their claims. “I think they really thought that it was a question of, ‘Well, if we just explain the science of this to people they'll see what’s the right thing to do,’” Hoffman said.

Instead of relying solely on the power of scientific truth, The Clean Rivers Campaign has also been working closely with local communities.

Action United is a neighborhood advocacy organization with offices in East Liberty and has been involved with the Clean Rivers Campaign since the beginning. “Particularly in this side of town I think a lot of urgency was created in the situation because of flooding,” said Bill Bartlett, Action United’s Western Pennsylvania Director, who attributed overflowing sewers as a significant cause. 

According to Bartlett and Oliver Norris, Action United’s Sergeant at Arms of the Western Region, the flooding was so bad that a flash flood several years ago trapped a woman and her two daughters in their car on Washington Boulevard, causing them to drown. To prevent such tragedies from occurring again in the future, Bartlett echoed the campaign’s proposal of installing green infrastructure, a method he believes would solve the flooding aboveground as well. The coalition has even been aided by consultants with experience building green infrastructure in other cities like Cincinnati and Kansas City.

But, to enact that kind of change requires a lot of legwork. According to Bartlett, this includes “knocking on people’s doors in their neighborhoods, having conversations in their living rooms about what are their most pressing issues and building unity and power in numbers.” 

Hoffman guesses members of the Clean Rivers Campaign have so far knocked on around 30,000 doors to inform Pittsburgh area residents about how sewer overflow goes into the rivers. “When we first started it was kind of funny because you’d go to a door and many people would say, ‘That’s crazy. I didn't know that. That’s disgusting. Is that really true?’”

However, when they visited the houses of people who owned boats or fished, the reactions changed. “They all knew exactly what we were talking about,” said Hoffman, who added that around half of the days during the boating season river-goers are warned by the health department that it is unsafe to touch the water. 

While the Clean Rivers Campaign has yet to persuade ALCOSAN to drop its tunnel strategy, the group has now enjoyed some successes, including getting the sewage treatment authority to create a customer assistance program to aide residents that can’t afford to pay the increasing sewer treatment bills. “We’ll see if we finally win, but we certainly, certainly got farther than anybody else has,” Hoffman said.