Recent Articles

By Jill Richardson

Did you see the baseball movie Field of Dreams? Even if you didn’t, you’ve probably heard the phrase “If you build it, they will come” — which it immortalized.

Well, how about “If you don’t build it, they won’t come”?

When it comes to bicycles, cars, and public transportation, both sayings are true (even though one is decidedly catchier than the other).

I recently moved back to Madison, Wisconsin after spending eight years in San Diego, California. I used to bike to work when I lived here before and bike for fun on the weekends. Now that I’m back, I’m commuting by bike once again.

Iowa has a distinguished history for being in the forefront of wastewater treatment innovations, but the state's border communities were holdouts in building sewage treatment plants and allowed to dump untreated municipal and industrial wastes into the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers long after other cities along smaller streams were required to treat wastewater, according to a history of Iowa's water pollution control published in 1974 by the Iowa Water Pollution Control Association.

Writing in "Iowa's Heritage in Water Pollution Control," State Sanitary Engineer Paul Houser noted that the state's largest border cities along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers were exempted from state stream pollution laws enacted in 1923 and 1949 "thanks to the lobbying power of the border cities and their industries.

"In fact, the exemption also included the lower 5,000 feet of any tributary, which was written specifically to protect the Sioux City meat packers dumping their untreated wastes into the Floyd River," Houser wrote.

Davenport's wastewater treatment plant dumped 317 million gallons of partially treated sewage into the Mississippi River in late June and early July after heavy rains and river flooding overwhelmed the treatment capacity of the plant along Concord Street.

Flood water and storm water runoff infiltrated sewer lines after the heavy rains and the plant began "bypassing" secondary treatment of the sewage, dumping an average of 10 million gallons of sewage per day into the river after only primary treatment of the wastewater. Primary treatment only involves removal of solids from the wastewater, essentially bypassing the normal secondary biological treatment of the waste.

The sewage "bypassed" by the Davenport plant was in addition to the 129 million gallons of sewage Bettendorf pumped into the river during the same period.