Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

 At the Bay Journal, Baltimore seeks 16-year extension on mandated sewer work

Twenty-three years after agreeing to fix Baltimore’s leaky sewer system, city officials say they won’t be able to finish the job by 2030, as promised nine years ago.

Now, they are asking Maryland and federal regulators to extend the deadline for another 16 years — to 2046 — which they acknowledge may not be enough.

It’s been a slog. Chronic sewage overflows and leaks had long rendered Baltimore’s harbor and the streams that that flow through the city generally unfit for swimming or other human contact. In 2002, the city signed a consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) in which it pledged to end overflows — initially by 2016.

As that deadline approached, city officials asked for more time. They said they had belatedly discovered that a major cause of overflows was a seriously misaligned pipe at the Back River wastewater plant. That glitch reduced the capacity of the sewer system, officials said, especially when rain leaked in through cracks and breaks in the pipes. Sewage backed up and overflowed, including through outfalls into streams that the city had built for such emergencies.

In 2016, regulators signed off on a new 91-page agreement that gave the city until December 2030 to fix the misaligned pipe and finish overhauling its 1,400-mile sewer system.

Asking for a 16 year extension is basically admitting you have no intention of ever doing the work.