Baltimore has agreed to pay nearly $6 million over the next four years to continue flushing treated sewer water into the Patapsco River at Sparrows Point.

The agreement represents a temporary band-aid to a problem that will ultimately require an expensive investment either in a rebuilt city discharge line using Sparrows Point as its terminus or a new outfall into the Chesapeake Bay.

The agreement, however, does end an impasse that started over a year ago when the world’s once largest steel mill shut down, threatening a relationship put in place 70 years ago by the legendary sanitary engineer Abel Wolman.

Under a plan implemented by Wolman, a Johns Hopkins professor who served as a consultant to the city and Bethlehem Steel, millions of gallons of sewer “effluent” was diverted from the city to cool the steel mill’s furnaces and remove hazardous wastes, such as pickling acids and coal-tar chemicals, from the plant.

For years, the wastewater running through the facility, often in open troughs, was dubbed “shit water” by employees because of its sickly brown color and putrid smell.

Used to Meet Pollution Standards

When the city’s Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant came under much stricter federal and state rules governing the discharge of sewage, the Sparrows Point diversion became essential to meeting the city’s outfall limits.

Thus, the bankruptcy of Sparrows Point’s parent company in May 2012 – and its subsequent sale to Midwest liquidators – exposed the city to potentially heavy fines  unless it could release the sewage water through the ex-mill’s outfalls.

The city battled with the liquidators, Hilco Group and Environmental Liability Transfer, to keep the outfalls open. An interim agreement reached in 2013 let the city continue to use the outfalls in return for a $80,000-a-month fee.

Fee Raised

That fee will be upped to $120,000 a month under a new contract with Sparrows Point Terminal LLC, a group headed by Anne Arundel businessman James C. (Jim) Davis that purchased the property last September.

After the first year, the monthly charge can be adjusted to reflect the prior year’s actual electrical costs (for pumping the effluent into the Patapsco River) and the Consumer Price Index for the Baltimore-Washington area.

The contract will stay in place for four years to give the Department of Public Works time to develop a permanent solution for the discharge.

The city has a $400,000 contract with Whitman, Requardt & Associates to advise it on alternatives to discharge the sewage water either at Sparrows Point or elsewhere.

Back in the 1940s, Abel Wolman worked closely with Ezra B. Whitman, the Whitman firm’s founder, to install a large pipeline under North Point Boulevard to transmit the sewage water from the Back River plant to the steel mill.

In its heyday, Sparrows Point used as much as 100 million gallons of effluent a day, which were frequently linked to fish kills in the harbor caused by the hazardous chemicals and heated water flushed out of the mill.

In subsequent years, water treatment facilities were installed at Sparrows Point, greatly reducing the amount of wastes going into the harbor.