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Sewage discharges to Mill Creek are frequent
YOUNGSTOWN
City sewage discharges into Mill Creek Park after heavy rains were a well-documented, perennial problem long before they caused this year’s massive Lake Newport fish kill in late June and Friday’s closure of Mill Creek Park lakes.
The lakes – Newport, Cohasset and Glacier – are closed indefinitely to fishing, boating and all other recreational uses. Mahoning County District Board of Health lab test results Friday showed excessive amounts of E. coli, a type of bacteria found in human feces, in five of seven Lake Newport water samples the BOH collected.
Two combined storm and sanitary-sewer overflows discharge into the north end of Lake Newport, one of them on West Newport Drive near the closed boat-rental facility, and the other at Glenwood and Ferndale avenues on the east side of the lake.
They discharge sewage into that lake an average of 10 and 10.6 times a year, respectively, according to a technical report issued last December for the city by MS Consultants Inc.
The document is titled City of Youngstown, Ohio, Combined Sewer Overflow Long Term Control Plan.
The overflows into Lake Newport, marked by large green warning signs, are among 12 that discharge into Mill Creek or the lakes along it.
Two others discharge an average of once a year each from the West Side of Youngstown into Calvary Run, which is a Mill Creek tributary.
These 14 overflows discharge sewage a combined average of 73.2 times annually, according to the consultants’ report.
High-frequency overflows come from several other outflow points:
Park Drive near the site of the former Idora Park ballroom, an average of 12.2 overflows a year.
Park Drive, 300 feet south of Slippery Rock Pavilion, 10.4.
Park Drive, 200 feet north of Parkview Avenue, 9.
Price Road and Halls Heights Avenue, 9.4.
The overflows that discharge into Mill Creek Park are among 101 overflows in the city’s sewer system.
An agreement between the city and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency calls for “substantial completion” by the end of 2033 of a $48 million effort to upgrade the city’s sewer system to avoid sewage discharge into Mill Creek and the park lakes along it.
As for financial assistance to eliminate the overflows, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said: “We are looking for something immediate. If there’s any kind of federal assistance, I don’t know that yet for Mill Creek.
“Longer term, it’s a terrible problem that we’re not investing in water and sewer” system upgrades, he said Monday. He assailed what he called the refusal of his congressional colleagues to reform taxes and close tax loopholes to generate more revenues for such projects.
The OEPA Division of Financial Assistance offers low-interest loans to communities such as Youngstown that must complete combined sewer-overflow elimination projects, said Linda Fee Oros, OEPA public information officer.
Mahoning County Commissioner David Ditzler said he would like to study the feasibility of consolidating city and county sewer systems to leverage more funding for improvements, as has been done in the Cleveland area, where Lake Erie water pollution has been a major problem.
“The Ohio EPA really has the enforcement authority here, not us,” said Patricia Sweeney, county health commissioner, explaining why the county didn’t do the initial water-quality testing at Lake Newport after the fish kill.
However, the county health board took and tested samples last week after complete test results from OEPA and city water sampling remained unavailable, Sweeney said.
Additional test results were not provided upon request of The Vindicator Monday by the city, OEPA or Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
It may take several weeks to obtain results of OEPA tests for dissolved oxygen and “general water quality” in Lake Newport, depending on the lab schedule, and the OEPA plans no further testing, Oros said.
OEPA does not know how many times so far this year each of the city’s sewer overflows have discharged into Mill Creek Park, its lakes or tributaries, but the city logs this information, Oros said.