{image1} It's getting to be a depressingly familiar story in these parts: Heavy rains, then heavy sewage overflows into Lake Michigan, from which Milwaukee and many of the surrounding communities take their drinking water.
The Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewage District seems to be fighting a losing battle against Mother Nature, and also in the court of public opinion, because its $2 billion-plus Deep Tunnel system is incapable of handling downpours without releasing sewage into the lake that otherwise would end up trashing hundreds, perhaps thousands of basements.
The MMSD is fighting its way through a policy and political minefield. Its 1980s-model system has succeeded by vastly reducing overflows. And the district has embarked on an ambitious program of adding both underground capacity and above-ground retention ponds to cope with the overflow issue. The problem is that these improvements are not yet fully in operation, and the more frequent the overflows, the easier it will be for suburban legislators to press for governance changes that would remove or dilute the city of Milwaukee's control of the MMSD board.
For new Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, it's both an opportunity and a problem. He campaigned on a program of district reform, and has expressed his unhappiness with the recent spate of dumpings, including this week's call for an independent audit of the commission.
But merely swearing in some new commissioners won't solve the physical and political limitations that currently envelop the commission.
What all the players need to do is agree that there needs to be a comprehensive environmental strategy throughout the region that places the health of Lake Michigan at the top of the agenda, with an emphasis on water preservation and resource conservation -- not on water as a marketable commodity.
Take a good look at Lake Michigan. It's easy to believe that huge expanse of cold, blue water is endless. The Great Lakes comprise 20 percent of the planet's fresh surface water. Lake Michigan inspires and sustains us. We are lucky, for sure, to live at its edge. But too many people in these parts are taking Lake Michigan for granted these days.
The MMSD needs, for starters, and without being defensive, to go beyond touting the capacity work it has in progress. It also needs to carefully explain something that has not yet been widely absorbed -- without rationalizing -- that climate change is a reality and that we are already experiencing some of its negative consequences.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency displayed data last December at a conference of Great Lakes Mayors chaired by Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago showing that Midwestern rainfall has become more intense in recent years. Could be those 100-year storms are becoming far more frequent.
The MMSD needs to explain that these more-common downbursts, along with surging development and population growth up-river and outside of Milwaukee County, are creating 'Perfect Storms' that send excess rainwater overflowing storm drains and overtaxing sewage treatment plants.
With less land to soak up faster-falling rain, and with every new driveway, parking lot, road extension, farm-to-subdivision conversion and downed tree contributing, more sewage will run into the lake.
The question is: how much additional stress can we put on this Great Lake, especially at the very time that new demands are mounting for Lake Michigan water? It would be good to remember that water is a bit like land - - they're not making a lot of it new these days.
Waukesha authorities are pressing for a precedent-setting diversion of 20 million gallons a day from the lake to be piped across the subcontinental divide. This is because Waukesha is facing supply issues and a costly federal order to remove radium from its well water. A U.S.-Canadian agreement currently bars diversions out of the Great Lakes Basin, but Waukesha officials are now seeing the map differently and have redefined Lake Michigan water as an entitlement:
"Waukesha is entitled to share lake water, utility head says."
That's the headline on a May 13 article in The Waukesha Freeman explaining the views of David Duchniak, Waukesha's Water Utility Department manager. "Waukesha is entitled to be considered part of the Great Lakes Basin, meaning it has the right to seek Lake Michigan water without having to worry about shipping water back east to Milwaukee County," the Freeman story says in its opening sentence.
For years, the debate about such diversions has always been framed by an overriding principle: Water removed must be replaced. But Waukesha is looking to change the rules of the game (and it is hoping that Gov. Jim Doyle will take the lead in Great Lakes' rule-making scheduled this summer), because for Waukesha, the issue is money: A diversion is the cheapest way to get fresh water in, and its proposal does not include returning an equal amount of water to the lake.
Waukesha believes 40 percent of its groundwater already seeps back to recharge the lake, so gallon-for-gallon replacement is a standard it hopes will be replaced or lowered. "People get too caught up in return flow issue," Duchniak explained to The Freeman.
But it's well-known that there are 50 or so water-hungry communities throughout the Midwest that are close to the Great Lakes Basin, and they are watching the fate of the Waukesha proposal as they prepare their own separate diversion requests: Suppose that they, too, see tapping into the Great Lakes as an entitlement.
We're back at the fundamental question: How much does Lake Michigan have to give?
The Detroit Free Press, whose readers are on the other side of Lake Michigan, had this to say about Waukesha's plan and a 2004 Earth Day trial balloon Doyle launched about it:
"Michigan's worst nightmare has always been that water-profligate states in the Southwest would want to siphon off Great Lakes water. Five years into a drought that has that region arguing fiercely about who gets what, that's still an unlikely scenario," The Free Press said in a May 16 editorial.
"But Michigan is unprepared for any scenario -- if not a major pipeline, then the more real possibility of drainage by a thousand pinpricks. It is inexcusable that the state's elected officials keep posturing about water instead of actually doing something.
"The more likely requests will come from just over the edge of the Great Lakes basin for growing subdivisions in places like Ohio and Wisconsin -- where Doyle was quoted recently by Great Lakes Radio as saying he had no problem with taking freshwater across the basin line as long as a similar amount of treated water is returned. Even activities that spur jobs, such as industries flocking here for access to reliable water supplies, would raise questions about how much water should be tapped where."
In other words, other Great Lakes states may not look kindly on what Waukesha wants, regardless of how badly it feels it needs it, or how tempting it may be for Doyle or the cities of Milwaukee and Waukesha to work out a way to make it happen.
But Waukesha's proposed diversion is dwarfed by a mind-numbing new daily drain proposed by Wisconsin Energy Corporation. How much fresh water does it want to cool the 1,200-plus megawatt coal-fired plant it is planning to build in Oak Creek: 2.2 billion gallons daily -- more than what Chicago, and Milwaukee and 100 other communities already remove collectively every 24 hours.
With Waukesha, it's returning some water. Not all.
With WEPCO, it's killing some fish, but not all.
And that return of 2.2 billion gallons of hotter water? Not a problem, WEPCO observed. It's a big lake, the size of West Virginia, which given the damage done there to the land and water by mining companies, may not have been the best environmental analogy.
You would think that with all the problems plaguing the Great Lakes -- invasive species, fluctuating levels, industrial pollution and sewage overflows into Lake Michigan, the very first priority would be to fix the immediate mess in our own Great Lake before putting more stress on it.
- Jim Rowen, an adviser to former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, is a Milwaukee writer and consultant.
