Maybe the city has been eating raw vegetables grown with water from our bayous?
By Manuel Barrera and Santiago IES
Yesterday we asked a simple question.
How much clean, treated drinking water is Houston allowing to escape from broken pipes, run down our streets, enter storm drains and eventually become part of the Bayou City?
Today we have another question.
What is coming out of the other pipes?
In Woodland Heights, a Houston homeowner says he has been complaining about raw sewage for more than three decades.
Not three months.
Not three years.
Since 1993.
Rob Kelley told ABC13 that when heavy rains come, raw sewage can flow down Wrightwood Street and remain there. He says he has called 311 hundreds of times. This week, ABC13 asked both the City of Houston and the Environmental Protection Agency what is being done about it. (ABC13 Houston)
That might sound like one man’s disgusting neighborhood problem.
It isn’t.
Five years ago, the federal government hauled Houston into court over something much bigger.
The EPA accused Houston of repeatedly allowing untreated sewage to escape from its wastewater collection system into waterways and of failing to properly operate and maintain portions of that system. Houston eventually agreed to a massive 15-year repair program. (US EPA)
Consider what lies underneath us.
More than 6,100 miles of sewer pipe.
Approximately 400 lift stations.
Forty wastewater treatment plants.
All serving more than two million customers. (US EPA)
When the federal settlement was announced, the EPA estimated that the required repairs would reduce raw-sewage releases by approximately six million gallons every year.
And where had some of that sewage been going?
Into Houston-area waterways, including Buffalo Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel. (US EPA)
There is something almost absurd about it.
Houston may have trouble keeping clean water inside the pipes carrying it to our homes.
And Houston has documented trouble keeping raw sewage inside the pipes carrying it away.
One leaks coming.
The other leaks going.
And eventually some of it can end up in the same place:
our bayous.
The federal government didn’t merely tell Houston to patch a few broken pipes. The consent decree requires enormous amounts of inspection, rehabilitation and construction. Houston’s own Public Works website continues publishing monthly sanitary-sewer-overflow reports and annual consent-decree reports in 2026. (Houston Public Works)
So five years into the agreement, how are we doing?
That answer isn’t nearly as comforting as taxpayers might hope.
An independent engineering review presented to Houston City Council this year raised questions about delays, missing information and whether outsiders can even determine from the city’s reporting whether Houston is on schedule. According to reporting on that review, five of the nine areas Houston itself identified as its highest-priority capacity problems remained in the design phase five years into the consent decree. (offthekuff.com)
Meanwhile, back in Woodland Heights, Rob Kelley isn’t studying engineering reports.
He’s smelling sewage.
He says he has been smelling it since Bill Clinton was president.
Maybe his particular problem has nothing to do with Houston’s larger wastewater troubles. ABC13 reports that the city and EPA are still determining whether the abandoned lift station near his home is included among the projects covered by the federal agreement. (ABC13 Houston)
But his story raises a question that Houston taxpayers ought to be asking.
If the federal government ordered Houston to fix its sewage system, and five years later residents are still reporting raw sewage running down their streets, are we fixing the system faster than it is deteriorating?
And there is another question coming.
Houston’s water and wastewater utility already faces billions of dollars in federally mandated repairs and improvements.
Mayor John Whitmire’s administration has now changed how additional city expenses are carried by that utility system.
What does that mean for the money available to repair the pipes underneath our feet?
That’s a question for another day.
For now, Houston has a simpler problem.
Yesterday we followed clean drinking water down the gutter toward the bayou.
Today we’re following something considerably less pleasant.
Houston is leaking from both ends.
And somewhere beneath all that concrete, asphalt and grass is a system of aging pipes that most of us never think about.
Until something comes bubbling up.