Inside Climate News, As Baltimore’s Sewer System Buckles Under Extreme Weather, City Refuses to Help Residents With Cleanup Efforts. Actually, it's been a pretty dry year.
A sewage cleanup program meant to assist Baltimore residents with backups in their homes has been in limbo for more than a year because of a deadlock between city authorities, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
The haggling over the future scope of the cleanup program has left Baltimoreans in the lurch and angered advocates who accuse city officials of exaggerating the cleanup costs and misleading elected officials.
Baltimore City runs two cleanup programs aimed at providing relief to homeowners, tenants and property managers dealing with sewage backup entering their homes due to wet weather conditions and clogged public pipes.
The programs resulted from a 2017 modified consent decree between Baltimore City, the EPA and MDE, which required the city to set aside $2 million a year to help residents with the costs of sewage cleanup. The Expedited Reimbursement Program covers the cost of property cleanup caused by heavy rain and pipe capacity issues, and the Sewage Onsite Support (SOS) program, launched in 2021, directly pays third-party vendors to clean and disinfect homes when overflowing sewer pipes cause sewage to flow backward and enter homes through toilets and sinks.
Sewage backups are a recurring and expensive problem for a large number of Baltimore residents. A 2021 report by the Department of Public Works estimated at least 8,860 sewage backups in the city between 2018 and 2021 caused by problems in the city-owned sewage pipes.
The current deadlock ensued when, in 2022, the city submitted a plan to the EPA and the MDE proposing to continue only the SOS program on a long-term basis with benefits limited to backups caused by storm-related flooding. Advocates want the city to include both dry and wet weather events in its scope, including backups caused by blockages and cracks in pipes, a common and pervasive problem because of decades of neglect and under-investment in the city’s sewage system.
In May 2023, the EPA approved the city’s proposal to continue with the SOS program but required that the $2 million in cleanup assistance must include all backups, including those resulting from clogged and cracked sewage lines. “The SOS program must address all backups that originate in the sewer mainline,” the agency said in its letter.
Quoting 2021 data, the EPA letter estimated an average of 4,400 annual backups reported between 2017 and 2021. Because of the limited scope of the city’s cleanup program, the letter said, less than 20 percent of backups qualified for the SOS program, which spent only $21,019 in assistance from 2018 to 2022.
In view of the city’s miniscule spending, the EPA concluded that Baltimore could easily cover additional claims by including in its scope those backups that occur in all types of weather and from blockages in the city-owned pipes.
But DPW refused to heed the EPA’s order and has since maintained that expanding cleanup benefits went beyond requirements of the modified consent decree, leaving the agencies locked in a dispute resolution process with no end in sight.
They just had to throw in the climate nonsense. The fact is, Baltimore's sewer system is a mess a lot of it is old and decaying, and because the government of Baltimore simply doesn't want to pay for upgrading it, and paying for the consequences. They keep hoping the Federal government will step in a do it for them, and they're probably right to expect that in the long run. Meanwhile, Baltimore residents in certain areas will just have to put up the sewers backing up in their houses, and the Baltimore government to be chintzy with their aid. You get what you vote for.
But they did find money for some "floating wetlands" in Baltimore Harbor, Bay Journal, Baltimore harbor gains “floating wetlands” and a hint of its marshy past. Actually, there's a surprising amount of wetlands near Baltimore. People just don't go there.
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