Every day in the Pine Tree state over 300-million gallons of human and industrial wastes are sent underground into complex sewer-collection systems that empty into 130 major sewage treatment plants. These facilities operate all day, every day, to make polluted water clean and provide a healthy environment for our families.

While much of this occurs without incident and out of public view, every so often something goes wrong with our sewer systems. The result can be a backup into a home, an overflow into the street, a road collapse, or some other public health or environmental hazard. Records show that in the last 10 years there has been an increase in the number of sewer failures. As these valuable infrastructure age, we should expect the incidences of failures to continue to increase, unless we act with preventive maintenance and plan for repair and replacement.

One of the challenges of wastewater collection systems is its invisibility; so much of the process takes place underground, out of public view. Absent the attention-grabbing activities of schools and public safety duties, sewer system funding is often a tough sell at budget time. Consequently, sewer system maintenance and repair are often woefully underfunded.

In Maine, most municipal sewer systems are at least 60 years old and there are many communities with sewers older than 100 years. Given the age of our sewer systems, maybe these are the questions municipal managers should be asking: Are our sewers reliable? What is the condition of our sewers? Where are the problem areas? With the answers to these questions, a community can then prioritize their maintenance and repair needs and plan for the future.

However, getting the answers to these questions is not so simple. It requires inspecting the sewers to assess its condition, and the sewers are buried underground, sometimes very deep. Special closed circuit TV technology is needed to perform the inspections. For communities that haven’t been routinely using a CCTV camera, these inspections will have an additional cost, and requesting additional funds can be a problem for the managers.

Although there is a cost for inspections, they are necessary to locate the problem areas. Once the problems are located, decisions can be made on how and when to fix them. Without the inspection information it is guess work as to where the problems are, until they arrive as an emergency, and dealing with an emergency always costs more than prevention. When a sewer fails due to age or maintenance issues, it is very disruptive to the community, and sometimes catastrophic to individuals.

It’s true that maintenance and repair costs can be high, but these costs will only continue to mount as our aging sewers continue to erode. With the average cost to replace a major sewer line at one million dollars per mile, sewer systems are the most expensive infrastructure for many communities.

State and federal environmental agencies that oversee the operation and maintenance of municipal sewer systems are encouraging municipalities to take a pro-active approach to managing their buried infrastructure. While there is little glamour in discussing a communities’ wastewater needs, we trust that citizens support this basic need of public health and clean waterways.