News-Sentinel.com

Friday, 11/10/2000

TROUBLED WATERS

Raw sewage and storm runoff: passing problems downstream



News-Sentinel photo by Steve Linsenmayer
Spencerville Spencerville is built nearly on top of the St. Joseph River. The needs of town, farm and river converge in Spencerville and in several other communities along the St. Joseph River.

By KEVIN KILBANE of The News-Sentinel

In 1982, community leaders in LaOtto arranged for tests to check how much raw sewage was seeping from residents' septic tanks into a ditch that eventually fed into a St. Joseph River tributary.

"You don't even want to know what it said," recalls Phil Troyer, president of the LaOtto Regional Sewer District. Nearly every septic tank tested passed raw sewage directly into the ditch.

So two years ago, the Noble County town installed a townwide, sanitary sewage-treatment system that eliminates individual septic systems. The new system uses a series of three settling lagoons to clean the sewage. Once in early spring and once in late fall, the system discharges treated water into a ditch that empties into Cedar Creek, a St. Joseph River tributary.

LaOtto is one of 21 communities that discharge sewage wastewater into Fort Wayne's source of drinking water, the St. Joseph River, or its tributaries.

Some towns, such as Auburn and Montpelier, Ohio, still dump untreated sewage into the river system after heavy rains. In some portions of those cities, rain runoff flows into the same sewer pipes as sanitary waste from homes and businesses. The combined flow can overwhelm the sewage-treatment plant, causing the plant to send some water through without treating it.

Cities such as Auburn and Montpelier are working to separate their sewer lines, so rainwater no longer will overwhelm their sewage-treatment plants.

Beginning near the river's source in Michigan and moving downstream, here are the communities whose wastewater systems discharge into the St. Joseph River watershed. Communities with combined sanitary and storm sewers are noted by an asterisk:

Michigan

- Pittsford

- Reading

- Merry Lake

- Camden*

- Lake Diane

- Waldron*

Ohio

- Nettle Lake property owners

- Pioneer

- Montpelier* (partial)

- Edon

- Edgerton

- Blakeslee (septic tank effluent)

Indiana

- Hamilton

- Waterloo* (partial)

- Butler*

- Corunna

- Auburn* (partial)

- Garrett

- Avilla

- St. Joe/Spencerville

- LaOtto

* -- combined sanitary and storm sewers