Blaming it on Rio: Water is still filthy

Olympic venue’s sister city, Niteroi, is proving cleanup possible

Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO

With thousands of liters of raw human sewage pouring into the ocean every second from Rio de Janeiro, August’s Olympic Games have trained a spotlight on Rio’s spectacular failure to clean up its waterways and world famous beaches. But just across the Guanabara Bay, its sister city of Niteroi is showing that a real cleanup is possible.

In Niteroi, 95 percent of sewage is treated and authorities say they are on track for 100 percent within a year, even though Rio’s failure to do its part means that sludge still flows in from across the bay. Rio has not only broken promises made to fix its sewage problem in time for the upcoming Summer Games, but the state has been downplaying expectations, even suggesting it might be 2035 before a full cleanup happens.

Niteroi’s success underscores key factors that stand in stark contrast to Rio: privatization of sewage management, major investment in infrastructure and a high level of accountability and collaboration between the city government and the utility to define targets and meet them.

In Rio’s Olympic bid document seven years ago, authorities pledged that an extensive cleanup – which included collecting and treating 80 percent of the city’s sewage – would be one of the games’ enduring legacies, but it simply never happened: An ongoing study commissioned by The Associated Press has shown that rowers, sailors and marathon swimmers will be exposed to waters so filthy they’re roughly equivalent to raw sewage.

Why did Niteroi succeed while Rio failed? For starters, it doesn’t help that Jorge Briard, president of the Rio state-owned utility known by its Portuguese acronym as CEDAE, says he isn’t sure where those targets came from. The utility is charged with meeting the Olympic bid goals.

“‘Why didn’t you achieve the 80 percent that was stated?’ That’s the recurring question,” Briard said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I always say, ‘I don’t know where the 80 percent came from. Certainly not from CEDAE.”

The situation in Niteroi in 1997, when a private sanitation company won a tender to manage the city’s sewage system, was even worse than Rio’s situation is now. About a third of the population didn’t have running water and more than two-thirds of sewage went untreated.

Over the past 15 years, the city has rolled out new treatment plants and hooked up hundreds of thousands of homes, thus stopping untreated waste from flowing into area streams and rivers that run into the bay.

“City Hall got to the point where it had no other alternative but to look to the private sector for someone who could solve the big problems,” said Carlos Henrique da Cruz Lima, planning director at Aguas do Brasil, the sanitation company.

It was a bold move. Similar situations existed, and continue to exist, throughout Brazil, and public utilities still outnumber private ones by around nine to one.