Local Wastewater Operators Persevere to Improve Our Public Waterways

As a follow-up to “Below the Surface: Tunneling for Cleaner Water” in Hartford, Connecticut (Fall 2024), Bill Hobbs writes about efforts in Massachusetts and Vermont to address the issue of combined sewage overflows into the Connecticut and other rivers.

The adage “When it rains, it pours” is one that is becoming all too familiar and challenging for the future health of our local waterways. Heavy rainstorms are one of the biggest threats because they seem to be occurring with more intensity and frequency, sweeping pollutants off rooftops, sidewalks, roads, farmlands, and every impermeable surface imaginable into rivers and streams. But with careful research, planning, and collaboration, community leaders are learning how to mitigate these high flow wet weather events.

This is a story about the men and women who work in wastewater treatment plants—the last collection point before most wastewater and stormwater is captured, treated, and sent out to public waterways—in Massachusetts and Vermont. Their job is not glamorous by any means, but what they do 24/7, 365 days a year is not only admirable, but undeniably important to the health and welfare of our lives.

This is also a story about combined sewer pipes that are huge headaches for communities where they are part of the sewage system. Many of these pipes were laid over one hundred years ago, “designed to dry out streets by collecting rainwater runoff, domestic sewage from newly invented flush toilets, and industrial wastewater all in the same pipe,” wrote John Tibbets in a 2005 article, “Combined Sewer Systems: Down, Dirty, and Out of Date” (National Institutes of Health).

Modern communities have separate pipes: one to carry sewage from homes and industries to a wastewater treatment plant for processing, and another to carry stormwater out to a wetland or river. When they were first installed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, many municipalities chose to combine stormwater and wastewater in a single pipe because it was more affordable than laying separate pipes.

In dry weather, most wastewater treatment plants can treat the daily flow of this combined wastewater just fine, unless there’s a mechanical failure or break in the system. When the network overloads during a heavy rain event however, combined sewer lines are designed to overflow into rivers and streams rather than back up and flood residential basements or neighborhood streets. This can result in a shocking discharge of thousands—sometimes millions—of gallons of untreated or partially treated wastewater and stormwater into rivers. This situation is called a combined sewage overflow (CSO).

According to the EPA, approximately 770 communities in New England and the Upper Midwest have single-pipe systems. Andy Fisk, Northeast Regional Director for American Rivers, explained in 2024 that some thirty to forty communities on the main stem and tributaries of the Connecticut River still have these old relic pipes.

After extensive research, I learned about four communities on the Connecticut River, their management of CSOs, and what steps they are taking to help the health of the public and natural waterways. The stories of these local wastewater operators are heroic.

Springfield, MA
Home to the Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, with a population of more than 153,000 people, had thirty-six CSO events in 2022 that discharged an estimated 218 million gallons of untreated wastewater and rainwater into the Connecticut River. In 2023, a particularly rainy year, it had 508 CSO events from twenty-three separate outfalls (points of discharge where the network piping releases effluent into a waterway) that poured approximately 488 million gallons of untreated rainwater and wastewater into the river. One can only imagine how daunting it is to address this problem, given that Springfield has 470 miles of underground sewer lines and 150 miles of combined sewer pipes.

If nothing else, it begs the question: What are the effects of discharges from CSO events? The answers include health problems due to exposure to unsafe pollutants; temporary bans on swimming, canoeing, and other recreational activities; periodic “no fishing” advisories; flooded basements; decreased property values for landowners near rivers; dying fish and wildlife in and around the rivers; and loss of scenic beauty, according to the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, a governing body that comprises the communities of Springfield, West Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, Ludlow, and South Hadley.

One of Springfield’s responses was to build the York Street Pump Station, an imposing device that doubles the city’s pumping capacity, sending more combined wastewater and rainwater to the wastewater treatment plant for processing during inclement weather. “More than 70 percent of wastewater from the city, including from combined sewer areas, flows through this pump station, so it is considered a cornerstone investment in our $550 million Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Renewal Program,” said Jaimye Bartak, communications manager for the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission. That agency, an independent, regional public utility, built and opened the pump station in July 2023.

York pump station addresses several converging needs, according to Bartak: to respond to federal environmental protection/CSO regulations; renew the increasingly unreliable, undersized, and aging infrastructure dating back to 1938; and reinforce resilience in their wastewater infrastructure by increasing capacity and redundancy. I asked if the new pump station had met the commission’s expectations. “Yes,” Bartak emphatically said. “In fact, during test runs in the wet summer of 2023, the station performed a bit better than the design flow. The hydraulics are working well, and data is being used to modulate the flow for optimal treatment at the wastewater plant.”

Since the 1990s Bartak reported that the commission has spent $300 million to mitigate combined sewer overflows. This included several costly sewer separation projects, where old, combined sewage pipes were excavated and separated into one for stormwater and another for wastewater. In 2008 Bartak reported that the commission also adopted a proactive sewer cleaning and inspection program, jetting or power washing the entire sewer system on a systematic basis to prioritize necessary repairs and maximize the capacity of the pipes.

Bartak, a former regional urban planner and project manager with experience in housing, transportation, and environment, expressed concerns though about equity. While she admits the Connecticut River is healthier today from the millions of dollars invested since the 1990s, she’s concerned that low-income communities like Springfield and elsewhere aren’t getting adequate funding for CSO remediations. She said that healthier waterways cannot be achieved without regional approaches that relieve low-income urban communities of the direct cost-burden of CSO remediation and direct attention to other significant sources of pollution, such as stormwater runoff in rural and suburban areas. Springfield still has work to do, though, before it is able to completely eliminate combined sewage overflow discharges into the river.

Holyoke, MA
Eight miles upstream from Springfield is Holyoke, a bustling city, rich in history, with a population of more than 38,000 residents. During the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Holyoke was called the “Queen of Industrial Cities,” known for its textile manufacturing. In fact, it was the first planned industrial city in the country. But the Civil War helped put an end to their cotton supplies. Undeterred, the industrial community literally switched gears, and soon after Holyoke became known as “the Paper City of the World,” boasting twenty-five paper mills. To accommodate this burgeoning industry and a growing population, the city built a vast sewer system with combined wastewater and rainwater pipes.

Like Springfield, Holyoke has been bedeviled by CSO discharges. The city was hit by a particularly heavy, punishing rainstorm at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, July 15, 2024. It was brief but intense, dumping one and a half inches of stormwater in forty minutes. The result was a discharge of more than 3 million gallons of untreated and partially treated wastewater and stormwater into the Connecticut River. One neighborhood in the northern part of Holyoke was overwhelmed by rain. “They got hammered,” reported Mike Williams, an on-site project manager for Veolia, a global company contracted by Holyoke to manage its wastewater treatment facility.

This event occurred despite the fact that in 2007 the city built the Holyoke Berkshire Street CSO 9 Treatment Facility, an $18 million structure, the first of its kind on the Connecticut River at the time. During heavy rainfall, high flows can be diverted into this facility, where approximately 100 million gallons of wastewater and stormwater per day is screened, disinfected, and partially treated, before sending it out to the river. The facility reduces overflows to the Connecticut River by an estimated 250 million gallons a year.

Today Holyoke’s wastewater treatment plant, lying alongside the CSO 9 facility, can treat up to 37 million gallons of wastewater per day. Complex steps for this huge facility include screening or removal of large debris, small grit removal, primary sedimentation (settling of solids), secondary treatment (biological breakdown of organic matter, using bacteria), and finally, disinfection (killing bacteria with chemicals like bleach or chlorine). The entire process takes about seventeen hours, from start to finish, depending upon the flow and volume, Williams said.

“Treatment plants are required to have an 85 percent removal rate of pollutants, and I’ve never been below that,” Williams confirmed. “I would say our wastewater treatment plant averages 99 percent removal.”

Williams is the personification of a professional water and wastewater operator, well trained and totally dedicated. He has been working in and around Holyoke’s wastewater treatment facility for seventeen years, the last six as project manager. He has the highest level of certification for wastewater operators in the state, and was recently promoted to regional vice president, a promotion he’s immensely proud of.

Another talented professional helping Holyoke improve its wastewater infrastructure and quality of life is Mary Monahan, chairperson for the board of public works for the city of Holyoke. Born and raised there, Monahan is a public works specialist, experienced in assisting cities and towns develop and fund local infrastructure projects.

Recently Monahan and others helped win $10 million in low interest loans from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund for the city’s next big construction project: separating combined sewage pipes. They have completed five CSO separations and have three more to go.

“We are awarding the contract this week for the first phase of the River Terrace sewer separation project,” Monahan told me when I last talked with her in mid-December 2024. “Phase 2 is in 2027 and one more project shortly after that to meet EPA and the city’s goal of 80 percent separation complete.”

Montague, MA
The Town of Montague is thirty-six miles upstream from Holyoke, a close-knit community of more than 8,000 people. It is the location of one of the largest hydroelectric generating facilities in Western Massachusetts, known as Cabot Station. It is also home to the Northeast Anadromous Fish Research Center, operated by the US Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Among other things, this unique facility develops state-of-the-art fish passage systems for migrating species, like American shad, Atlantic salmon, and striped bass.

Chelsea Little is Montague’s superintendent of the Water Pollution Control Facility and a veteran wastewater operator. “Montague uses a blending process during high flow wet weather events,” she noted. “This involves the use of a special tank [it holds 32,000 gallons] at the wastewater treatment plant. The tank is equipped with an automatic valve and chlorine dosage system, which disinfects and partially treats the wastewater and stormwater before it’s added or blended with the normally treated effluent that’s sent out to the river.”

Little wants the public to know and understand that during high flow wet weather events amateurs aren’t managing these combined sewer overflows. In fact, both Little and Williams told me that whenever they have a CSO event and they alert the community, the public reacts very negatively at city hall meetings and on social media. “They assume that something went wrong, or we purposely allowed raw sewage to enter the river,” Little said, calling these comments “disheartening.”

“I want people to understand there’s a reason we have licenses, and that you must be in the field for so many years to get certain licenses,” Little said. Her license allows her to work in both municipal and industrial wastewater treatments.

In 2023 Little received the Water Environment Federation’s Hatfield Award for “Outstanding performance and professionalism in the operation of a wastewater treatment facility.” She also has a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and a master’s degree in public health from the University of Vermont. “It’s a perfect mixture for working in wastewater treatment,” Little said.

“The challenge for communities is climate change,” Little said. “The heavy precipitation events that we’ve been getting are more extreme than in previous years. So, we’re dealing with higher flows, and they’re coming at us more often.”

Chris Halleron, manager of communications and community relations for Veolia North America, agrees with Little. “I’m just leaving the Massachusetts Mayor’s Association in Taunton, and the intensity of acute, extreme weather events was a big topic, and the impact they’ve had throughout Massachusetts, particularly in the Connecticut River valley. These are demonstrably more frequent, more damaging, and need to be addressed.”

Brattleboro, VT
Located about twenty-six miles upstream from Montague, near the southeastern tip of Vermont, is Brattleboro, a community named by Style Magazine as one of the top ten small art towns in the country. It was here in 1852 that the Estey Organ Company (makers of musical instruments) started production, and for more than one hundred years, reigned as the largest organ manufacturer before closing in the 1960s. In 1892 English author Rudyard Kipling married Caroline Balestier, a local, and settled here. He wrote The Jungle Book and many other famous stories while living in Brattleboro.

Brattleboro had no CSO events in 2022 and 2023, and as of this writing, only two small discharges in 2024. “We have no [combined sewer] pipes,” Dan Tyler, director of Public Works, proudly told me. “They were all separated or capped in the 1960s.”

Tyler, however, has other concerns. One is the rising cost of hauling sludge away from Brattleboro’s wastewater treatment plant. Wastewater sludge, according to the EPA, is a mud-like residue that is a byproduct of wastewater treatment. It has some redeeming qualities including nitrogen and phosphorus that can be useful as a soil enhancer or fertilizer. On January 14, 2025, however, the EPA reversed itself, warning that there could be “forever chemicals” or PFAS’s in the sludge harmful to human health.

“We digest the sludge, de-water it through presses, and then truck it away,” Tyler explained. “But the cost of that bio-solid management has gone through the roof.” The town is currently paying Resource Management, Inc., of Holderness, New Hampshire, a fee of $150 per ton, plus $900 per load to transport it, with the city averaging 1,700 tons of sludge removal a year. This means Brattleboro is paying nearly $1.8 million annually to haul it to Holderness, 114 miles away.

Williams said Holyoke’s sludge removal is costly, too. Holyoke is paying $165 per ton and averaging $1.4 million in annual expenses to remove it. “Our landfills are not expanding, incinerators are old and becoming beyond their useful life and very costly to maintain,” he said, adding, “If the state of Massachusetts does not begin to find outlets and opportunities for wastewater treatment plants to dispose of it, the cost of sludge disposal will significantly increase everyone’s sewer rate.”

50 Years of Progress
Since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, wastewater treatment and CSO remediation efforts have come a long way and greatly improved our waterways. Today combined sewage pipe separation remains one of the best ways to combat wastewater and stormwater overflows, but it’s costly. But when you take those steps, the effort separates the combined flows in the existing network and allows for more capacity in the collection system.

Other communities are using smart monitoring equipment, like Holyoke’s SCADA system, to predict and manage high flows. Rain gardens, permeable pavements, and retention basins are also helping, while some cities, like Hartford, Connecticut, are building massive underground storage tunnels to hold combined sewer overflows (See Estuary, Fall 2024). Once the storms have passed, these cities then meter the effluent back through their wastewater treatment plants, before releasing the contents into a river.

More work needs to be done to manage CSOs, but credit must be given to the men and women who are on the front lines in wastewater treatment plants and in Public Works Departments. “There are challenges ahead,” Fisk notes. “But we should be sustained by the accomplishments we’ve made, because many people thought they were unsolvable. We did not throw up our hands then, and we should not now.”

Bill Hobbs is a contributing columnist and writer for Estuary magazine. He lives in Stonington, CT, and can be reached for comments at whobbs246@gmail.com.