Fulton and DeKalb Counties, Georgia
Sewer Line Repair Atlanta: Most of This City's Overflows Have Nothing to Do With Rain
Atlanta's sewer system has been run to a federal court order since 1998, and one consequence of that is unusually good public data. The city reports its overflows quarterly, under oath in effect, and a federal audit has analysed them.
The numbers in those reports contain a fact that ought to change how a property owner here thinks about a slow lateral. Between 2013 and 2017 the city reported between 6 and 31 rain-induced sewer overflows a year. Over the same period it reported between 202 and 266 dry-weather ones.
Rain-induced overflows are a capacity problem, and capacity is what the court order is spending nearly two billion dollars on. Dry-weather overflows are something else entirely. When a sewer overflows on a day it has not rained, the cause is a blockage rather than a storm, which means it is about what went into the pipe rather than how much fell on the city.
Discuss an Atlanta Sewer LinePlumber Atlanta: The Main City Page
A Collection System Built to a Timetable Set by a Court
The sequence is worth knowing because it explains why Atlanta's underground work has the shape it does, and why the city publishes so much about it.
Citizen plaintiffs filed a complaint in 1995 alleging that the city had violated its discharge permits at several combined sewer overflow treatment facilities. In 1997 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia entered summary judgment against the city on the issue of liability. The United States and the state of Georgia filed suit in 1998, and later that year a consent decree was entered with the city.
It carried $2.5 million in civil penalties and a hard target: reduce combined sewer overflows to no more than four a year. The city's own 2002 remedial measures plan recorded that the control facilities had been overflowing 50 to 70 times a year.
In 1999 a First Amended Consent Decree extended the work to the whole wastewater collection and transmission system with the objective of eliminating all sanitary sewer overflows. The treatment facility portion was completed and terminated by the court in 2004. A 2003 amendment adjusted the capital programme, and a 2012 amendment extended construction to 2027.
That extension came with a published price. The court cited the environmental results already achieved and the cost of the remaining work, which the city said would be funded by a 252 per cent increase in water and sewer rates and a one per cent municipal sales tax.
The combined sewer side worked. Overflows fell from 50 to 70 a year to ten events in total across the nine years from 2009 to 2017, never more than four in any one year. That is the target met, and it is a genuinely large public achievement.
The sanitary sewer side is the unfinished half, and it is the half that runs past your house.
Who Is Watching, and What Happens When They See Something
A system under a consent decree has an audience that an ordinary utility does not. These are the parties named in the decree and in the federal audit of it, and each one has a different lever.
A federal District Court
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia entered the decree and has approved every amendment since, including the 2012 extension and the 2004 termination of the treatment facility portion.
EPA Region 4
Reviews planning documents and quarterly progress reports, and chairs quarterly meetings on implementation. The audit notes the meetings are not required by the decree, which makes them a choice rather than an obligation.
Georgia EPD
The state environmental agency reviews the same documents and takes part in the same meetings, using its own authority alongside the federal one.
A campaigning organisation
The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper is a co-plaintiff in the case and a party to the settlement, and can attend the quarterly meetings. A non-governmental body with a seat at the compliance table.
The quarterly report itself
The city submits reports describing maintenance and operation activities, permit violations, overflow events and future work, and certifies that the information is true, accurate and complete.
An inspection with no notice
The EPA and the state are allowed to enter facilities at any time to inspect, verify submitted data, take water samples and review records required to be kept under the decree.
And the lever that connects all six: under the decree, the city must pay stipulated penalties when permit violations occur, and report those violations in the quarterly reports. The federal audit records that the city has reported paying them.
Between 2013 and 2017 the audit counted 29 fecal coliform exceedances, most of them 15 to 30 times above permit limits, along with 11 failure-to-sample violations and six chlorine residual exceedances. Violations across the wider period averaged about eight a year.
What It Means for a Private Lateral
Capacity Work Fixes Rain. It Does Not Fix a Blockage.
At the end of 2017 the city reported that it had completed 72 per cent of its sewer system construction projects and finished two of its six sewershed projects, having spent $1.07 billion of an estimated $1.90 billion. Construction in the four remaining sewersheds was scheduled for 2020, 2025, 2026 and 2027.
That is an enormous amount of public capacity work, and it addresses the rain-induced overflows directly. What it does not address is the 200 to 266 dry-weather overflows a year, because those are not capacity events.
The audit is explicit about the mechanism. Sanitary sewer overflows occur when sewer blockages from debris, or water infiltration from other connections, prevent sewage from flowing freely to treatment. Rain-induced overflows happen when the system is overcome by rainwater. Dry weather events happen when blockages in the system cause sewage to overflow.
For anybody with a private lateral in Atlanta, that is the sentence to take away. The bigger category of overflow, by a factor of more than ten, is the category caused by things that block pipes, and the same things block a four inch lateral considerably sooner than they block a public main.
It also puts a floor under the case for surveying a line rather than clearing it repeatedly. A city that has spent a billion dollars and still reports two hundred blockage-driven overflows a year is telling you, in public, that this failure mode does not go away on its own.
Six Cities, and Atlanta's Row Is the One We Could Not Confirm
This table has grown one row per city across the series. Atlanta's entry is honest rather than complete, and the reason is worth stating in the open.
| City | Who owns the line between the house and the main |
|---|---|
| Los Angeles | The owner is responsible to the mainline connection. See our Los Angeles sewer line repair page. |
| San Diego | The entire lateral is private property, with city help billed back in stated circumstances. See our San Diego sewer line repair page. |
| Phoenix | A city duty to repair broken service lines in the public right of way. See our Phoenix sewer line repair page. |
| Sacramento area | Split, with the district owning the lower lateral and marking the boundary physically. See our Sacramento sewer line repair page. |
| Denver | Not published in the material we could read. See our Denver sewer line repair page. |
| Atlanta | REPORTED, NOT READ. The City's own sewer evaluation pages describe a cleanout installed at the edge of the easement or property line as the boundary marker, with the householder owning the line from the cleanout inward. That host did not respond to us at all, so we are naming the rule as reported rather than quoting it as read. |
Two of the six rows now carry a caveat instead of an answer, and we would rather that than the alternative. A responsibility boundary is the most expensive single fact on a page like this one. Getting it from a source we could not open, or from a competitor's marketing site, would be a worse outcome than admitting the gap.
For a specific Atlanta address, the Department publishes a customer care number that runs around the clock, and asking it about your own property line is free. That is a better route than any general rule, including this one.
Reporting a Defect
The City's Own Sewer Emergency List Is Four Items Long and One of Them Is a Hole
Alongside the decree machinery sits something far more immediate: what the Department asks residents to report, and on which list.
Its published sewer emergency list runs to sewer overflow, meaning a spill or a main break, flooding, a ruptured sewer line, and a sinkhole. Its water emergency list is separate and covers flooding, a broken water main, water service termination, confirming a boil water advisory and suspected contamination.
Sinkhole on the sewer list rather than a roads list is the entry that matters here. A pipe losing water into the ground carries soil away with it, and in Piedmont clay over weathered rock that process makes a void long before it makes a hole. By the time the surface goes, the defect is old.
The practical version for a property owner is short. Depressions in a lawn, a driveway that has started to dish, a patch of grass that is greener or lusher than the rest of it, and paving that has moved without an obvious cause, are all worth a camera survey before they are worth an excavation.
Our Atlanta drain cleaning page covers the City's colour and smell test for telling a water leak from a sewer one, which is the first question to answer before reporting anything.
Sewer Line Repair Atlanta: The Court Order and the Blockage
Why the city builds sewers to a federal timetable, what the overflow numbers actually say, who audits the work, and the ownership question we could not confirm.
Citizen plaintiffs filed a complaint in 1995 alleging permit violations at several of the city’s combined sewer overflow treatment facilities. In 1997 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia entered summary judgment against the city on liability, and in 1998 the United States, the state of Georgia and the citizen plaintiffs entered into a consent decree with the city carrying $2.5 million in civil penalties.
The 1998 decree dealt with combined sewer overflows, requiring full permit compliance, elimination of unpermitted discharges from the combined system, and a reduction to no more than four overflows a year. The 1999 First Amended Consent Decree took on the wastewater collection and transmission system with the objective of eliminating all sanitary sewer overflows.
By the target set, yes. The city’s own 2002 remedial measures plan recorded overflows 50 to 70 times a year. Capital improvements were completed in 2008, and for the period 2009 through 2017 the city recorded ten combined sewer overflow events in total, with no more than four in any one year.
A 2012 amendment, approved by the District Court, extended the construction period for the sewage collection and transmission system to 2027. The court cited the environmental results already achieved and the cost of the remaining work, which the city said would be funded by a 252 per cent increase in water and sewer rates and a one per cent municipal sales tax.
Because that is when most of the city’s reported overflows happen. Between 2013 and 2017 the reported figures ran from 6 to 31 rain-induced overflows a year against 202 to 266 dry-weather ones. A dry-weather overflow is caused by a blockage rather than by rain, which means it is about what went into the pipe, and a private lateral blocks long before a public main does.
We are marking this one reported rather than read. The City’s own sewer evaluation material describes a cleanout installed at the edge of the easement or property line, with the householder owning the line from the cleanout inward, but that site did not respond to us at all while this page was written. For a specific address, ask the Department directly rather than relying on a general rule.
Several parties at once. The District Court holds the decree. EPA Region 4 and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division review planning documents and quarterly reports and hold quarterly meetings. The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper is a co-plaintiff and party to the settlement and can attend. The EPA and the state may enter facilities at any time to inspect and sample.
Under the decree the city must pay stipulated penalties when discharge permit violations occur and report those violations in its quarterly reports, and the federal audit records that it has reported paying them. Between 2013 and 2017 the audit counted 29 fecal coliform exceedances, most 15 to 30 times above permit limits, plus 11 failure-to-sample violations and six chlorine residual exceedances.
Because a leaking pipe carries soil away with the water, and in Piedmont clay over weathered rock the void forms well before the surface gives way. Listing it as a sewer emergency rather than a highways problem is the City stating the connection plainly. Dishing driveways and depressions in a lawn are worth a camera survey before they are worth an excavation.
No. There is no price on this page, and the only figures are ones published by the city or by the federal audit of its compliance. Sewer work varies by depth, ground, access, length and what a survey finds, and a headline number would mislead somebody about their own property.
Sources, Two Printed Caveats, and What Was Left Out
The decree history, the penalty figure, the overflow targets and reported counts, the construction progress figures, the funding mechanism and the oversight arrangements all come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General's report 18-P-0206 of 30 May 2018. The emergency lists come from the Department of Watershed Management's report a problem page.
WHY A FEDERAL AUDIT RATHER THAN THE CITY. The city's own consent decree programme website did not respond to us at all, and its main municipal site refused automated access. Rather than assemble the story from search result snippets, we used a primary federal document that quotes the city's own reported figures and says which year each one is from. The figures on this page therefore run to 2017, and later progress will have been made.
A HIGHER FIGURE EXISTS AND IS NOT QUOTED HERE. The city has publicly claimed a larger reduction in overflows and a larger total spend than the audit records. That claim sits on a page we could not open, on a different basis and a different date, so it is named as existing rather than reproduced. Two figures on different bases are not a contradiction, and presenting one as though we had read the other would be.
The ownership row is marked REPORTED, NOT READ for the same reason, and no CSO facility or tunnel is named beyond what appeared in the audit itself, because a facility list assembled from search snippets is a list of guesses.
Deliberately not covered because other pages own them: trenchless mechanics, lining, bursting and open cut, which our national sewer line repair page carries; the five other cities' permit and ownership instruments, each on its own page; and cooking grease as a blockage cause, which is the obvious story here and belongs to another page in this series.
Related Atlanta pages: drain cleaning and emergency plumbing. For the wider region see our Georgia service areas, or get in touch.
No office, address, crew or response time of ours is stated for Atlanta, and we are not claiming to be based in this city.
Everything above was read from a published federal audit and from City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management pages at the time of writing. Compliance status, construction schedules, reported overflow counts and responsibility boundaries all change. Nothing here is a legal opinion or a statement about a specific property.