As you walk around Baltimore you may notice storm drains that remind us about the city’s water system and its connection to nearby waterways. For many years, not unlike many cities, all of Baltimore’s wastewater was merely directed to nearby streams and rivers. Fortunately, when the city needed to rebuild after its devastating 1904 fire, officials decided to invest in building separate storm and sanitary sewers. The sanitary sewers are the ones that take raw sewage away to be treated, while only storm water pipes run into the streams and rivers.
However, well over 100 years later, the system has new problems. Not only are there times when aging pipes cause sewage to overflow or seep into waterways, but citizens need to be reminded that the storm drains are not a place for trash and pollutants that cause visual and environmental harm to the Jones Falls, the harbor, the Chesapeake Bay, and oceans… The Healthy Harbor initiative was developed in 2011 to solve these issues through clean up and planning, with an ultimate goal of making the harbor safe for swimming and fishing.