Milestones: Celebrating A Century of Progress

Historical Milestones for Wastewater Treatment in Columbus

1834  Columbus is incorporated as a city with a population of 3,500 people.

1841 First sewer in Columbus is constructed. With no form of wastewater treatment, it was discharged directly into the Scioto River. Back yard “necessary houses” are still common.

1848-50 Broad Street sewer is financed and construction begins. Population is approximately 18,000.  

1852 A Spring Street area creek is enclosed in a covered sewer; however, by 1855 it is leaking badly.

1880  Mystery illness at the Ohio Statehouse known as “Statehouse Malaria” found to be caused by a contractor connecting “waterclosets” to the ventilating flues instead of the sewers, a problem dating back to 1861 when the building opened. 150 barrels of waste removed. Approximately 23 miles of public sewer exists.  

By 1900 144 miles of public sewer exist, providing about 80% of the population access. It is a combined sewer system with outlets to Alum Creek and the Scioto River, untreated, creating a public nuisance. Population has surpassed 100,000. A report by Julian Griggs, Sewer Commission Engineer, recommends building a wastewater treatment plant and various bond issues to finance construction are pursued. Engineering as a profession is emerging and various capital improvement projects for sewers are planned or underway.  

1908 The first wastewater treatment plant is put into service, designed to treat 20 million gallons per day. It consisted of septic tanks, stone-filled tricking filters and final settling tanks. Population is now 170,000 and 270 miles of sewer exist.

1927 Growth outpaces treatment plant capacity with population now at 315,000. State Board of Health orders clean up of Scioto River pollution levels. Plans are drawn up for a new plant. The Olentangy-Scioto Interceptor Sewer (OSIS) main line sewer goes into design.

1934 Construction on the Jackson Pike Wastewater Treatment Plant begins.  

1937 Jackson Pike WWTP is put into operation, treating 50 million gallons per day. Only 19 employees are responsible for the treatment process. Population surpasses 315,000.  

1950  An ordinance creating the Division of Sewerage and Drainage is passed, under the Department of Public Service. Nearly 200 employees are employed in the division. Population has reached over 500,000.  

1967 The Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant is put in operation to supplement the Jackson Pike plant, with a capacity of 40 million gallons per day. Population is now 575,000.  

1972  The Environmental Protection Agency passes the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, which sets the basic structure for regulating discharge of pollutants to waters of the United States.  

1977 The EPA amends the 1972 act with the Clean Water Act, making it unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters unless a NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) permit is obtained.

1980  The division builds a Compost Facility near farmland with the help of the Ohio EPA. This is seen as an environmentally friendly way to dispose of bio-solids by recycling the nutrients back into the land in a compost mixture with wood chips called “Com-Til.”

1984  The Clean Water Act is amended and new standards are required to be in place by 1988. Division initiates “Project 88,” a 200 million dollar wastewater treatment plant expansion plan. The Sewer and Water Advisory Board is formed to review customer rate changes. DOSD is now under the newly created Department of Public Utilities and Aviation, to be later renamed the Department of Public Utilities in 1991.  

1986 A section of what is now an over 100-year-old Broad Street sewer collapses and a Columbus lawyer driving a Mercedes Benz lands in a 20 foot hole. The lawyer is uninjured but the incident makes national news.   1988 Water quality in the Scioto River shows improvement by this time, marking a turning point. 1993 Construction of the Franklinton Floodwall, a joint city/federal flood protection project for the Franklinton area, begins.  

1993-94 A Stormwater Management Program section and a Stormwater Utility Fee is established to fund stormwater capital improvement projects.

2000 The division employs 577 full-time positions in nine sections that includes operation of two 24-hour treatment plants, Compost Facility, a Sewer Maintenance Operations Center, a Surveillance Laboratory, Industrial Pre-Treatment Program and other services. Population served for wastewater treatment is estimated at 1,040,000. Sewer miles exceed 4,000. A new stormwater National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Permit is granted by the Ohio EPA. An update to the division’s Sewer Facilities Plan is submitted to the Ohio EPA for incorporation into their 208 Area Wide Plan.  An average of 156.6 million gallons of wastewater per day is treated at the wastewater plants.

2004 The Franklin Floodwall is completed. The new floodwall removes approximately 2,800 acres on the west side of the Scioto River from floodplain restrictions, allowing many property owners to drop flood insurance. A thorough review of existing sewer added to 87 miles of new sewer brings the total that Columbus is now responsible for maintaining to 5,486 miles of storm, sanitary and combined sewers. An average of 187 million gallons of wastewater per day is treated at the plants.

2005 (July 1) The City of Columbus submits a 40-year Wet Weather Management Plan to the Ohio EPA, which identifies an estimated 2.5 billion dollars in capital work to increase capacity to the Columbus sewer system.

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As It Were: Sewers Began Flowing Smoothly Around Turn of Century 
by Ed Lentz (reprinted with permission)  

The primary danger faced by people living in Columbus 150 years ago was not civil disorder, nor fire, or even the devastation of natural disasters like tornados and floods.

Even though the City of Columbus has had its share of all of these, the primary killer of people in early Columbus was disease. And the cause of that disease was the lack of sewers.

Columbus existed for more than 30 years without sewers. In the course of that time its population grew from 500 people to more than 8,000. But most of these people were living on the original town plat established in 1812. And for every person in town there was at least one or two horses, cows, sheep, dogs and even an occasional pet bobcat. All of these people and livestock generated an enormous amount of what one writer of the period euphemistically called "animal and vegetable waste."

Some of this waste was deposited in backyard privies or trash pits. Some was deposited in what residents called "gutters" but were really little more than shallow ditches on each side of the unpaved streets in the town. And some material, especially from businesses and stables and the like, was actually trucked to the river and dumped - thereby enriching the lives of the residents of Circleville and points south.

By 1848, this situation had become intolerable. Several local institutions joined with the city in financing a three and one-half foot sewer which ran under Broad Street from the river to Jefferson Avenue. Constructed of brick and buried 18 feet deep, the sewer did its job quite well for more than 100 years. It was bypassed by later improvements, but most of the sewer still carries the weight of the street above it quite well. A notable exception to that resilience was a 20-foot section which collapsed under a rather surprised but uninjured motorist in a Mercedes a few years ago.

And while this early effort at sewer construction seemed to work well, the same cannot be said for the projects which followed it over the next 40 or 50 years. In 1852, the rather large creek that gave Spring Street its name was enclosed in a covered sewer. This was viewed as a notable improvement since prior to that time one crossed the street on footbridges set at the major intersections. But by 1855, this sewer was leaking so badly that every basement along the street was knee-deep in foul-smelling water.

At the end of the Civil War, a "sewerage commission" reported that the laying of sewer lines in the city had no rhyme or reason. The lines did not connect one with another and whole parts of the downtown were not served at all. The answer to the problem was a new series of large "trunk" sewer lines which themselves would be connected to an "intercepting sewer" which would empty into the Scioto well below town. It was a logical, simple and forthright solution to a difficult problem. If the recommendations had been implemented in a sound workmanlike way, the result would have been helpful. They weren't, and the result was a nightmare.

The South End Sewer, draining most of what is now German Village, was so riddled with leaks that most of the wells along its route went dry as they drained into the adjacent sewer. The Fourth Street Sewer collapsed along 400 feet of its route shortly after its completion.

But the most exasperating problem occurred south of Town.

The original idea had been to build a sewer which picked up the contents of most of the downtown sewers and run it parallel to the Scioto until it emptied into the river well below town. Fearing lawsuits by property owners outside town, the city stopped the project after it crossed the Ohio Canal near the breweries and let it empty into the river at that point. That point happened to be a rather flat flood plain which rapidly became in the words of City Engineer John Graham, "an elongated cesspool emitting disagreeable and pestilential odors along its entire line for a distance of nearly a mile."

Responding to this, city officials built yet another set of trunk line sewers serving the growing city in the 1880s. This project was supposed to cost $150,000 - an enormous sum for that period. It ended up costing $350,000. An investigatory report of the period explained why. "The Council and its officers, it seems, did not know that lumber would be required in making the excavation. They did not know a superintendent would be necessary. …They did not know that the discharge of a main sewer into Alum Creek, just west of the Lutheran College, would render its buildings uninhabitable."

Another writer from the same period concluded that "All of which suggests the importance of choosing municipal officials on the basis of qualifications rather than that of political belief."

This cut to the core of the problem. Sewers were used as a political pawn in the 19th century. Partisan politics was largely governed by the spoils system in Columbus until well after the turn of the century. And some of the most important spoils were the lucrative paving, construction and repair contracts handed out by city officials to their friends and supporters. The main reason the sewers were built haphazardly and quickly was that the builders were non-professionals trying to complete the work as quickly as possible.

All of this began to change with the emergence of engineering as a profession and the rise of non-partisan capital improvement construction projects in the early 1900s. For the past 70-80 years, sewer construction and maintenance has been so efficient and effective that we view a sewer failure as an unusual event. And while that is as it should be, we often forget to thank the people who build and maintain the system we cannot see but without which, our city simply would not be.  

@ 1993 Ed Lentz. Lentz is a local historian, author of published book “As It Were,” and free-lance writer for This Week Newspapers.