Jamestown has been faced with three straight years of high levels of releases flowing through the James River. This has meant three straight years of high water tables and water infiltration into the city's sanitary sewer system. Residents must continue to help ease the stress on this system.
While Jamestown residents don't have control over the flows of water through the river and the groundwater accumulations, they can reduce stress on the system.
Residents need to follow the recommendations from city officials to limit water entering the sewer system. This means continuing to observe the odd/even schedule for heavy water use and, most importantly, disconnecting sump pumps from the sewer system.
The odd/even schedule requires homeowners with even house numbers to do heavy water-use tasks like laundry on even-numbered days. Residents with odd house numbers should perform those tasks on odd-numbered days. City ordinances also require sump pumps to drain outdoors, preferably to the street where the water can flow into the storm sewer system where it ultimately flows into the river.
Doing these simple things can help the sanitary sewer system and therefore our community.
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City officials say current flows are stressing the sewer system. In the remote possibility that the system should fail, whether on a local level or catastrophically across the city, the result will be sewage backups into homes. The gallons of water pumped into the system from a sump pump in one part of town could be part of some homeowner's cleanup problem in another part of town. This occurs if the amount of water in the sanitary sewer system exceeds the capacity of the sewer pipes and mains and causes backup into the lowest homes first.
To put it another way, if you route your sump pump into the sewer, you increase the likelihood of another resident suffering a sewer backup.
We'd like to think that some people who are doing it don't realize the harm that this could be causing. Others perhaps don't care. But they should, because problems could affect all of us.
It's also important to note that we think many residents are following the scheduled suggested for heavy water use and are correctly having their sump pumps drain outside. They are appreciated.
Upgrades to the Jamestown sanitary sewer are expensive and will take a number of years to accomplish. It's important to keep the system functioning and it makes sense to keep the stress on it as manageable as possible.
Follow the odd/even water use schedule as requested by officials. Drain your sump pump outside and into the storm sewer system. These are simple steps that reduce the risk to the entire community.
(Editorials are the opinion of Jamestown Sun management and the newspaper's editorial board)
