HOUSTON -- As workers shoveled a stinking mess of silt and sewage from the sidewalks on the banks of Buffalo Bayou alongside the University of Houston's downtown campus, students saw and smelled what happened during the Halloween flood.
"It's filthy," said Demarcus Hill, a student at UHDC. "It's low-key disgusting. Just raw sewage. It's the city's waste, like, in the streets."
Actually, it's waste in the parks. Houston has converted long stretches of greenspace along its bayous into urban parkland, most notably the privately-funded $58 million renovation of Buffalo Bayou Park.
The city's overwhelmed wastewater system flushed more than two million gallons of raw sewage into Houston's bayous over the weekend. Houston's public works department said the deluge that fell on Houston would've swamped any city's sewage system.
"When you get 10 inches in less than a day, you're going to overwhelm the carrying capacity of any system," said Gary Norman, a spokesman for the public works department.
But bayou activists criticize the city's ongoing problems with sewage overflows, pointing out the same unsanitary problem showed up on downtown streets during last month's floods.
"We should not accept this at all," said Steve Rupp, the water quality director for the Bayou Preservation Association. "I mean, this is not what should happen in a modern city. We shouldn't have sewage overflows like this."
Sewage flows mostly downhill toward treatment plants, Norman explained, so it has to be exposed to air to keep the stuff running through the pipes. During floods, he said, sewers fill up with water not only running through the holes in manhole covers, but also through breaks in underground pipes.
"The answer to all of this is money," Norman said. "We have spent over 10 years $1 billion – that's billion with a ‘b' – rehabbing pipes in the system."
Norman said another $925 million in the works for the next five years.
Bayou activists voiced frustration after the latest bout of flooding and sewage overflows, advising people walking around the affected areas to take sanitary precautions.
"It's very bothersome that our city cannot appropriately take care of basic things like wastewater treatment plants," said Kathy Lord, executive director of the Bayou Preservation Association.
"We have a program to address this," Norman said. "It just takes a lot of money and a lot of time."
