Response 10: Sewage and Sandblasting

When I bought my first house in 2006, one of the points of contention in our contract with the seller was who would pay for the cost of repairing the home’s water drainage system in accordance with new city of Pittsburgh regulations. Our real estate agent told me that the EPA had ordered Pittsburgh and all of Allegheny County to revamp their outdated sewer systems because storm runoff was flowing into the same sewer lines that carry waste and causing raw sewage to overflow into the rivers. This was the first I had heard of this problem, and I don’t know if I fully believed it. But I looked into it and found out she was right. Pittsburgh residents would soon be forced to reorient their gutter downspouts so that they didn’t flow into sanitary sewer lines and then there was a dye test to make sure that homeowners were abiding by the regulations. Our agent said these regulations had been a long time coming and all the other municipalities in Allegheny County had already fixed the problem. Pittsburgh would be the last. We asked the seller for a credit of close to $2000 to make the necessary repairs and they gave it to us. When I thought about all of the homeowners who would have to pay a similar sum of money, I started to realize the magnitude of the problem. Not to mention the environmental damage the raw sewage had already caused.

This project will end up costing the city and county billions of dollars and residents will have to pay too in terms of alterations to their homes and higher bills. I think it is well worth paying more to fix Pittsburgh's sewage problem, but I worry about the sewage that has already found its way into the rivers. I read that the deadline to eliminate sewage overflow into the area's rivers is 2026. And what about cleaning up the sewage that's already there?

If I wanted to write lyrically about the sewage problem in Pittsburgh, maybe I could connect it to a narrative about the relationship I was in at the time I bought my first house. There are some parallels, like the idea of problems lurking below the surface and the fact that the solution (whether repairing the sewer system or breaking up the relationship) didn’t really fix things.

Another topic I might like to write lyrically about is growing up in Pittsburgh as it worked to change its reputation from a smoggy steel town to a clean, thriving place to live. When I was a child, many Pittsburgh landmarks were still covered in soot. I remember walking around in Oakland and seeing the Carnegie Library and the Cathedral of Learning and thinking they were made of black stones. Then little by little crews of sandblasters came in and cleaned the stones. Sandblasting was a part of my childhood vocabulary and the process was mysterious and intriguing. I didn’t understand that the stones were not naturally black and it was hard to grasp the idea that they had been turned black by air pollution. I think it would be interesting to explore some of these ideas from a child’s point of view and to integrate current reflections and research.

Writing an environmental argument would be a challenge for me because it’s not the mode I’m used to writing in. I like the idea of including resources at the end of an essay or a book related to environmental issues, like Janisse Ray did at the end of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I also like the idea of writing a small section at the end of a piece with a discussion of steps that people can take to address environmental issues discussed. For instance, if I were writing a lyric essay about sandblasting and my memories of Pittsburgh, I could include an afterword about current air quality in the city and steps for improving it.