Ahh the best mathematical and "modeled" engineering solutions often go awry. I'm sure that every Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) otherwise known as a Wastewater Treatment Plant has been designed to work and be able to handle the flows of sewage from their respective locations/towns/cities etc. Normal sewage flows that is. Then you have complicating factors such as I & I here in Elmira known as Inflow & Infiltration. This includes idiot developers hooking up roof eavetroughs to discharge subsurface into the Sanitary sewers. The idea is to get large volumes of rainwater away from foundations and basements. Of course the rainwater ends up overflowing the local STP and causing premature discharge of partially (at best) sewage into the receiving body of water, in this case the Canagagigue Creek. Then world class polluters like Uniroyal/Crompton/Chemtura/Lanxess quietly, out of the public view, pressure Woolwich Township into shutting the hell up about their ongoing discharges into the Creek.
Today's Waterloo Region Record carries a story titled "City fined for sewage spills". In this case the City is the City of Guelph. The fine is $106,250 plus 25% victim surcharge. Apparently a couple of pumping systems failed releasing over four million litres of human sewage into the Eramosa River. Wow! The sad part is that these leaks/spills are not uncommon. Almost every town and city has them occasionally whether due to negligence, mechanical failure, extreme weather events flooding and overflowing their STPs or other causes. Most likely many of these "spills" are not caught and certainly not "fixed". For some the "fix" of the overloaded STP may be the "spill" itself. After all it's taxpayers' money paying the occasional fine, not managements' nor local politicians.
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