SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
There is something wrong with the plumbing in Cincinnati. Billions of gallons of raw sewage end up in the waterways each year. And for some people in the city, that raw sewage gets a lot closer to home, like inside their actual homes. From Cincinnati Public Radio comes the podcast Backed Up. Host Becca Costello and producer Ella Rowen dive deep into one of the most complex parts of our infrastructure.
BECCA COSTELLO, BYLINE: We're talking about the sewers. For most of us, once we flush the toilet...
(SOUNDBITE OF TOILET FLUSHING)
COSTELLO: ...It's someone else's problem.
ELLA ROWEN, BYLINE: That is, until whatever you flushed comes back up.
COSTELLO: This is the first big mystery. Sewage ends up in places that doesn't belong way more than it should in Cincinnati and lots of other cities. So why?
ROWEN: Should we bring in the bulletin board?
COSTELLO: Let's do it.
ROWEN: All right, so if movies and TV have taught me anything about mystery solving, it's that we need to put all of our evidence on a bulletin board.
COSTELLO: Imagine a dark windowless room. A cluttered table sits beneath a flickering bare lightbulb. Ella is pouring herself a tenth cup of coffee while I pin newspaper clippings and suspect photos to the bulletin board.
ROWEN: We connect the dots with red yarn, trying to decode dozens of sewer-related acronyms.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: EPA.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: CSO.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: MSD.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: CCF.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: MSD.
(CROSSTALK)
ROWEN: OK, so here's what we know. I'm putting up a map of Cincinnati right on the Ohio River. That's where we live.
COSTELLO: So the sewer system is run by the Metropolitan Sewer District of greater Cincinnati. And going forward, we're just going to say MSD instead of all of that. MSD also covers most of Hamilton County.
ROWEN: MSD is a wastewater utility. They collect dirty sewage, like what goes down the toilet, industrial waste, like what comes from factories, and a lot of storm water. That comes from clouds.
COSTELLO: They treat it, then release it, squeaky clean, back into waterways like the Mill Creek and the Ohio River. Here's how they describe their work.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati maintains more than 3,000 miles of public sewer. On a typical dry weather day, wastewater from our homes, businesses, and schools flows through the public sewer without problem to one of MSD's seven major wastewater treatment plants. But what happens when it rains?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
COSTELLO: When it rains, the system can't handle the sudden influx of stormwater.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: When it rains harder, even more stormwater can enter the sewers, which can cause the system to become overwhelmed with more flow than it can carry.
COSTELLO: Overwhelmed with more flow than it can carry - that means when it rains a lot, all at once, untreated sewage gets backed up...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Hey, that's the name of the show.
COSTELLO: ...Through pipes into people's basements. This is called a sewer backup, or SBU.
ROWEN: Sewer backups.
COSTELLO: Right.
ROWEN: OK, so let's start there. That seems like kind of an urgent problem.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
COSTELLO: Hi, I'm Becca. This is Ella.
ROWEN: Hi, nice to meet you.
FLORENCE MILLER: Glad to meet you.
COSTELLO: Thank you so much for having us.
Florence Miller has lived in Cincinnati her whole life. This house right on the edge of Clifton and North Avondale was built in 1922, and she's lived here for over 50 years, right now with one of her sisters.
MILLER: Been retired since 2016 - and before that, I was a programmer analyst, you know, from, like, 1968, and I have two sisters and a brother, and I'm the oldest of the four. I've traveled pretty much of the world. I've been to 25 countries...
COSTELLO: Oh, wow.
MILLER: ...Ridden on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and walked the Great Wall of China, been to the Galapagos Islands, Iceland. So yeah, I've been fortunate to be able to do that.
COSTELLO: But you've always stayed in Cincinnati as your home base. So why is that? What do you love about Cincinnati that kept you here?
MILLER: It was family. You know, we're all here within 10 miles of one another, so...
COSTELLO: That's really the best definition of home, right?
MILLER: Right. Right. Like "The Wizard Of Oz." There's no place like home, right?
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE WIZARD OF OZ")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) It's a twister. It's a twister.
COSTELLO: Actually, it was a thunderstorm on a rainy August night in 2016.
(SOUNDBITE OF THUNDER CRACKING)
MILLER: It was a Sunday night. I think it was a Sunday night.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Torrents of rain falling from the sky, collecting on concrete and asphalt, creating the perfect flash flood storm.
COSTELLO: Florence had just retired. She was sitting at home, watching what she thought was a typical Midwest storm roll in. But when she went down the basement stairs to check on her cat Gabriel, she realized this storm was different.
Did you know that it was sewage?
MILLER: Oh, yeah. When it's coming out of the drain down there, it's sewage.
COSTELLO: Did it smell?
MILLER: Oh, yeah. The stench was terrible.
ROWEN: Dirty water was gushing up through the floor drains, and it was rising fast.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FLOWING)
MILLER: I mean, it was up to our waist, and we were wading through it. It's like, if we'd have fallen down, we would have drowned. I've never seen anything like that in my life.
COSTELLO: Yeah.
MILLER: I'm in my late 70s, so...
COSTELLO: Florence showed us piles of pictures she'd saved from the day of the storm.
MILLER: We have a whole bunch, but this is the one that was on the newspaper. That's my car.
ROWEN: Oh, my God. That photo was wild. The water nearly covered the hood of her car.
COSTELLO: The headline, by the way, above this...
MILLER: Oh, storm of the century, right, 'cause here's the backyard. That's the backyard.
COSTELLO: It's just a pond.
MILLER: Yeah. And I'm just glad Gabriel wasn't down in the basement at the time 'cause he would have died.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ROWEN: Gabriel the cat was thankfully not in the basement that night. But Florence stored lots of meaningful things down there, like family keepsakes.
MILLER: We lost my great aunt's credenza down there. We lost that, and we lost my mother's wicker needlepoint basket. And we lost some personal Christmas ornaments, you know, 'cause everything was just toppled over.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
COSTELLO: The list of damages was long.
MILLER: Oh, yeah, this was the dryer.
COSTELLO: Was that ruined?
MILLER: Oh, yeah, the dryer and the washer and the water heater, the furnace, the air conditioner, the dehumidifier - yeah, there's a gazillion pictures.
COSTELLO: Oh, wow. It almost looks like a tornado, like tornado damage.
MILLER: But then, too, the gas was leaking, you know, from the furnace. Everything was destroyed.
COSTELLO: Were you aware of issues with the sewer system or anything before this happened to you?
MILLER: No. No. I mean, that would be the farthest thing from anybody's mind, really. Yeah.
ROWEN: Florence said the water went down within a couple of hours, but the damage stayed behind.
COSTELLO: The morning after the storm, she actually saw a couple of MSD workers down the street.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MILLER: And I thought, they're coming over here, and they're going to see this, and they're going to say it's, you know, sewage backup, and they're going to give me a work order.
COSTELLO: She marched over there and just stood waiting for them to finish and then demanded an inspection. And it worked. They came over and took responsibility.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MILLER: It was draining to do this, you know, 'cause we were trying to clean out everything plus, you know, itemize everything and then put it in a spreadsheet that you could submit to them. I mean, it took months.
ROWEN: When MSD causes a sewer backup, they're supposed to cover the cleaning costs.
MILLER: You know, then I submitted the claim for the cleaning 'cause it was a mold and mildew mediation and then the fans to dry everything up. Oh, then the MSD wasn't paying him. And then he came over one Saturday and said, I'm going to put a lien on your property. I said, oh, no, you're not. You know, it's like, that's not my problem. You need to deal with MSD.
COSTELLO: So when you first submitted your itemized claim, what was the total amount that you ended up with that you would need to pay?
MILLER: It was $22,000, something like that (ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MILLER: That was quite a lump sum of money, you know, and, like, people couldn't afford to finance that kind of thing either. Fortunately, I could, you know, but it took over a year to pay everything off.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FLOWING)
ROWEN: I just keep picturing Florence wading through all of that water in her basement, looking for her cat. And it - oh, I hate it.
COSTELLO: Right. And think about what raw sewage actually means. We're talking bacteria, other hazardous substances that can be pretty dangerous to come into contact with.
ROWEN: And like, she didn't swallow any of the water, but imagine if she had She easily could have tripped and fallen.
COSTELLO: And Florence wasn't the only one with a flooded basement that night. The 2016 storm ended up being one of the worst in decades. There were sewer backups and flooding all over the city.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: MSD has reimbursed Florence for the money she spent. That was host Becca Costello and producer Ella Rowen for Cincinnati Public Radio's podcast Backed Up. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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