HAMMOND — A federal judge has approved a mandate to clean up Hammond, Highland and Griffith’s urban waterways.
U.S. District Court Judge Philip P. Simon signed an order last weekend requiring the three communities to stop using the Grand Calumet and Little Calumet Rivers as open sewers.
But, that was the easy part.
Now local, state and federal government officials must work together — something they declined to do in the past — to bulk up the communities’ sewage collection and treatment infrastructure.
This is all being done to contain periodic surges of sewage-tainted stormwater from overwhelming the current sewage system.
The polluted water flows through Lake Station, Gary, Highland, Griffith, Munster, Hammond and south suburban Chicago and into Lake Michigan.
The bulk of the improvements is assigned to the Hammond Sanitary District, which serves 170,000 customers in Hammond, Munster, Griffith and Highland.
It will build a new treatment plant in south Hammond near the Little Calumet River in addition to making other sewage collection improvements, Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said last spring.
Griffith will install new sewer lines and pumps to transport 15.5 million gallons per day to Hammond — 10 million gallons more per day than the town currently does.
Highland is committed to reconstructing its sewers to accommodate a maximum peak flow of 32.2 million gallons of sewage per day — four times the current amount — to flow more efficiently north into Hammond’s treatment facilities.
The judge makes clear in his 29-page opinion that the work ahead won’t be cheap, quick or easy.
The consent decrees mandating the improvements give local officials until 2033 to finish work at a cost, estimated last spring, of $185 million.
The judge states that while city and town officials all agree a cleanup is necessary, they disagree about how to share the construction and operational costs.
Hammond complains it was frozen out of negotiations among Griffith, Highland and state and federal environmental officials to work out details of the two towns’ parts in the project.
The judge said Hammond officials worry “Griffith and Highland were willing to run roughshod” over Hammond’s interests to seal an agreement with federal and state environmental officials at Hammond’s expense.
But the judge refused to hold up the project, ruling the decrees must be put in place now because the environment and public health would suffer while everyone waits for an accord among the three.
He said the decrees impose deadlines and fines on any of the communities that drag their feet.
The judge concludes, “The sanitary waste has to go somewhere other than public waterways. Where was it to go?
“The answer is Hammond, and, more to the point, Hammond agreed to it in its (2017) consent decree. Yet, now I’m being told that somehow Hammond is unfairly being kept in the dark on a paradigm it agreed to five years ago. The logic of this escapes me.
“The proposed consent decrees are consistent with the goals of the environmental statutes and are in the public interest,” the judge writes.
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