IRONDEQUOIT, N.Y. — Engineers went 75 feet underground on Tuesday to check on the county’s sewer overflow system. When there is heavy rain, all that water has to go somewhere.
“We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in the environmental health of the Genesee River, Irondequoit Bay, and Rochester embayment,” said Mike Garland, Monroe County Director of Environmental Services.
When our sewage system was built, the waste and the storm runoff went through the same pipes. So for decades, during heavy rain, raw sewage went straight into the bay. That changed in the 70s. These tunnels dropped that overflow number from about 90 times a year to around 5.
“This gives context to those overflow events. You can see the markers on the side and you can see how much water this thing actually holds,” said Adam Bello, (D) Monroe County Executive.
It was built with money from federal grants. Garland says only three cities in the county took advantage of that. Even fifty years later, he says a safety net to catch storm runoff is still rare.
“We’re often asked, ‘Why wasn’t it designed to handle every single storm?’ That wasn’t practical, financially practical at the time, or from a capacity standpoint. As they often say, churches aren’t built for Easter Sunday, nor was this system for every single storm,” Garland said.
Every few years crews go in to check and make sure nothing needs fixing. The water collected here heads to treatment centers around the county.
“The public doesn’t always get to kind of see this stuff, right? The massive amount of infrastructure that exists here is largely behind the scenes. Because you don’t really think a lot about the different types of infrastructure that we have until it stops working,” Bello said.
Those tunnels can handle up to 175 million gallons of overflow at a time. And according to News10NBC’s Hailie Higgins, they fortunately do not smell.
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