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It turns out concrete is a terrible choice for sewer pipe, since it tends to break down after 15 or 20 years of exposure to sewage.

Whoops.

Baton Rouge found out the hard way and—like many other cities and counties around the nation—is now faced with the monumental and expensive chore of fixing a sewer infrastructure that’s literally disintegrating beneath its feet.

The original plan to deal with the problem involved digging large tunnels underground to handle overflow. That plan was abandoned shortly after Mayor Kip Holden’s election, William Daniel’s appointment as interim public works director and a subsequent review of current technology options available for fixing broken sewer systems.

The city-parish is under a federal consent decree to get cleaned up by 2015 to a degree acceptable to EPA and DEQ.

The effort is just getting under way in many respects, and sewage is still overflowing from manholes and backing up into people’s bathrooms in certain trouble spots during heavy rainfall.

But progress is being made, according to Peter Newkirk, parish director of public works, who says installing computerized monitoring equipment is a top priority.

Computerized monitoring, which Houston has been doing since the early 1990s, allows engineers to quickly identify weak parts of the system instead of laboring months or even years to come up with a model of the system that’s probably obsolete by the time it’s finished.

Computerized versus non-computerized is the difference between being able to detect and replace a failing sewage pump before it quits, or finding out there’s a problem only after the pump dies and causes sewage to overflow.

Newkirk says the program manager for the city-parish sewer rehab project, CHM2 Hill, is in the process of writing a general request for proposals for computerizing. Newkirk says the 2005 hurricanes slowed down the rehab project, though the department is catching up.

“I would say in a year’s time we’ll be ahead of schedule,” he says. “Once we get our control system in and get our systems computerized, we can really take off.”

A just-released DPW budget supplement contains more than $30 million in projects—most of it engineering work though some actual construction rehab—that ought to carry DPW through the next 12 to 18 months.

“We’ve identified preliminarily many of the severe target areas that need to get worked on right away,” Newkirk says. “Because we’ve got about an $800 or $900 million program to be complete by 2015, if you do the numbers we’ve got to spend close to $150 million a year.”

He thinks the parish will be into EPA compliance by the deadline—if there are enough contractors to go around. Newkirk says the General Contractors Association assures him there will be enough labor and materials available the next five or six years to get the job done, though DPW is a little nervous. If the department can’t get enough bids on some of the work that will have to be documented and presented to the feds, who have no sense of humor.

“Once EPA has you on their radar, they kind of don’t let up,” Newkirk says.

That’s why getting out from under the consent degree also is an urgent priority.

“There are sewer systems all over the country that are experiencing problems,” Newkirk says. “It’s not like you can pull a northern contractor to come south. Plus we have all that road construction that’s going on with the Green Light program. A lot of those contractors do both sewer rehab and road construction.”

The source of the consent degree is the parish’s south treatment plant on Gardere Lane, which during heavy rains regularly exceeds legal limits for how dirty the discharge can be that’s pumped into the Mississippi River after treatment. The parish’s other two plants, north and central, are in compliance most of the year.

The Gardere plant deals with greater volume, for one thing. Also, the sewer lines feeding it are in such bad shape that millions of gallons of plain old rainwater get mixed in with the sewage, overwhelming the plant’s ability to thoroughly treat it before it goes into the river. What often happens to concrete sewer lines is that the tops of the pipe get eaten away by the sulfuric acid created by the sewage filling the bottom half of the pipe.

All kinds of ingenious ways to repair sewer lines have popped up in the past several years—methods that didn’t exist when the deep tunnel approach was decided on, and which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers even recommended. Deep tunneling wasn’t necessarily a bad engineering idea at the time, but nobody really got a handle on how expensive it would have been to dig deep tunnels. Also, the local soil—mostly silt and clay—isn’t very stable for that kind of thing. And with South Louisiana’s high water table and normally high rainfall levels, the tunnels might have been too full of water to handle overflow anyway. We’ll never know for sure.

Today’s alternatives for sewer rehab include coating the insides of existing pipe with epoxy to seal it up, and inserting new PVC or fiberglass pipes into existing lines. It’s all about reducing the infiltration of non-sewage into the system. Infiltration is what causes overflowing manholes and disgusting toilet backups.

Newkirk sympathizes with residents ankle deep in sewage and paying high user fees at the same time. Help is coming, even if it takes a while, and fees shouldn’t rise anymore, he says.

Walter Monsour, the parish’s chief administrator, says sewer user fees will stay on residents’ bills at least the work is completed. At least they won’t increase, as would have happened had deep tunneling been pursued, he says.

“It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a quick fix,” Monsour says. “What we can assure the people of East Baton Rouge Parish is that there’s been a continuous operation toward comforming to the consent decree. It will take several years to do. Unfortunately in the sewer program and the roads program, we’re addressing issues that should have been addressed 20 years ago.”

Newkirk notes that Knoxville, Tenn., a city like Baton Rouge in size and sewer trouble, saw dramatic improvements after rehabbing some if its major infiltration areas—places where lots of rainwater was getting into the system and overloading it.

“You’ve just got to realize that’s going to eventually to get fixed,” he says. “I think people need to realize a city is always going to have sewer problems, we just shouldn’t have them to the extent we have them right now.”