BALTIMORE – By all accounts, Baltimore’s two wastewater plants have been running more smoothly and polluting much less than they were three years ago when chronic treatment failures actually worsened water quality in the Chesapeake Bay.
But the Patapsco River treatment plant, the state’s second largest, seemingly took a step backwards in May, when it experienced a spate of equipment overloads and failures that released a total of 155 million gallons of incompletely treated wastewater into the Bay tributary.
City officials said pump breakdowns and other equipment problems, aggravated in some cases by heavy rains that greatly increased inflows to the plant, caused them to divert some wastewater past the plant’s enhanced nutrient removal system. The diverted wastewater still got primary and secondary treatment, city and state officials note, and it was disinfected with chlorine before being discharged into the river.
Nevertheless, sampling at the plant’s outfall showed elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorus going into the Patapsco, which is already impaired by excess nutrient pollution.
Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper Alice Volpitta said her nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore’s routine water quality monitoring of the Patapsco did not detect elevated bacteria counts near the wastewater plant’s outfall during the incidents.
Even so, Volpitta called the bypasses of the nutrient removal system, detailed June 3 in a Maryland Department of the Environment inspection report, “disheartening.”
“It’s like an echo from four years ago,” she said. One photo in the MDE inspection report showed unwanted vegetation growing in a treatment tank, and another showed conveyor belts clogged with solid waste removed from the incoming wastewater. The inspector cited five different violations, including broken equipment and poor maintenance and housekeeping.
Volpitta called these the “root causes” of the plants’ earlier woes that if left untreated, she warned, could result in a relapse at the plant.
In the MDE inspection report, city officials suggested that in at least a few of the bypasses, the plant was overwhelmed by high inflows of wastewater during heavy rains.
Volpitta countered that it was “not an unusual amount of heavy rain” and that spring downpours are normal occurrences. “Our wastewater system should be able to handle routine rain events,” she said. Plant operators were also cited for failure to report the wastewater bypasses and a smaller sewage overflow to MDE within 24 hours of discovering them, as required.
“It’s really discouraging to see some of these old problems cropping up again.”
Recently, Maryland’s environment secretary, Serena McIlwain, had hailed what she called a “dramatic turnaround” in the operation of Baltimore’s Back River and Patapsco wastewater treatment plants, which had been so poorly run and maintained that in 2022 her department temporarily seized control of Back River and stepped up oversight of Patapsco.
The city subsequently signed a consent decree in 2023 pledging to fix the problems. Since then, McIlwain reported, there has been a 60% reduction in nitrogen pollution from the Back River plant, the state’s largest wastewater facility, and 78% from the Patapsco plant.
MDE, meanwhile, is preparing to renew the Patapsco plant’s discharge permit, allowing it to expand its treatment capacity from 73 million gallons per day to 81 million but also imposing new requirements on facility operators.
At a June 12 public hearing on the permit, Michael Hallman, deputy water and wastewater bureau head at the city’s Department of Public Works, attributed the bypasses to a lack of operating pumps to move storm-swollen surges of wastewater through the enhanced nutrient removal system.
He said the city has completed 16 of 19 improvement “milestones” it was required to reach at Patapsco under the consent decree. Two of the remaining ones require rehabilitation of the facilities that separate solid material from the liquid wastewater so it can be treated. Contracts have been awarded, he said, but those projects will take time, with some repairs to be completed by the end of 2027.
Overall, Hallman said, the Patapsco plant’s performance “has improved tremendously in 2023 and 2024, and I expect that to continue.”
MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said that until just before the bypasses occurred, Patapsco this year was removing more nitrogen and about as much phosphorus as it did in 2024.
“We expect the nitrogen numbers for May will be worse due to the bypasses,” he acknowledged, but MDE nevertheless expects the overall nutrient removal for this year to be better than in 2024.
Even so, Apperson added, “MDE will be meeting with Baltimore City [Department of Public Works] in the near future to discuss these issues and what steps they will be taking to minimize these occurrences in the future.”
Meanwhile, several residents who attended the public hearing in Curtis Bay insisted that regulators should strengthen requirements that the plant notify MDE and the community promptly whenever there’s a problem at the plant — especially one that results in a wastewater release that might make swimming or wading along the river shore unsafe.
The city recently installed a required buoy in the river to mark the end of its wastewater outfall pipe. The buoy has a light that is supposed to flash if bacteria in the discharge exceed prescribed limits. But a couple of residents pointed out the light is not visible from shore. Waterkeeper Volpitta said the MDE and public notification requirements in the plant’s permit are insufficient to protect people’s health.
She noted that the two Baltimore plants are so large that they can have an outsize impact on water quality when they have problems. In 2021, when their maintenance and staffing failures surfaced, the two plants discharged so much nutrient pollution into Back and Patapsco rivers that it more than offset reductions made at all other treatment plants combined in the Bay watershed.
The plants’ performance matters, Volpitta said, because while Blue Water Baltimore’s water quality monitoring shows an “improving trend” in bacteria levels in the harbor and its watershed, there’s a declining trend in other measures of ecological health.
“In some ways, that’s reassuring,” she said. “In other ways, it really is a wake-up call. … If they don’t continue to improve,” she warned, “there’s no way we’ll ever see waterway restoration in the region.”
Sounds like lazy workers…