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Photo by Ashley Cross/The Ottawa Herald
Lagoon systems, like this one on Old Highway 50, represent one way rural sewage is handled in Franklin County. Sewage is diverted from the house plumbing to the sewer pond where it discharges under water.
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Rural sewage issues cause concern for some
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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Water. It's essential to all of us. But pollution and limited resources threaten our water supplies, and a confusing web of entities controls who gets water and how much. The Herald's exclusive, six-part series examines important water issues facing Franklin County.
The heavy clay soil in Franklin County dictates what septic system rural homeowners will have to build.
"In some cases, there aren't many options and we'll tell them that," Larry Walrod, county planning director, said. Walrod's department enforces the county sanitation code.
The underground septic tank, with its system of underground lateral lines, is the most popular septic system in rural America and is the most common septic system in rural Franklin County.
"If they have a choice, most people will put in a septic tank," Walrod said.
The septic tank is a large buried tank with a baffle in the middle. It's designed to help separate the sewage, which speeds up the digestion process for natural biological beasties living in the gunk.
The more indigestible matter settles to the bottom of the tank, which must be periodically pumped out.
As the gunk settles or is eaten and liquified, the liquids moves through outlets in the tank and into a network of buried perforated pipes called laterals.
The anaerobic bacteria, which die in the presence of oxygen, keep eating the effluent, which is slowly distributed into the subsurface soil, the best filtration and purification system there is.
However, because of the county's heavy clay composition in much of the soil, which won't absorb effluent well from laterals, 30 percent of the septic systems in the county are lagoon systems.
The most common form involves running an impermeable plastic pipe from the house plumbing to an outlet the middle of a specially-built sewer pond. The end of outlet pipe, which rises from the floor of the pond, discharges underwater.
Different-type of bacteria that love oxygen, called aerobic, eat the gunk and are helped by sunlight and wind. The effluent evaporates.
Lagoons take up more land and are often seen as more objectionable, Walrod said. Lagoons often require more on-going maintenance.
There are other more exotic forms of septic systems, often dictated by the type of soil or lot, he said. Such systems, including a pressurized drip-irrigation systems and wetlands, often are more expensive or trickier to keep operating at full efficiency, he said.
"But sometimes, there aren't any other options," Walrod said.
But septic systems are a prerequisite of rural life, he said.
Indeed, most rural counties have adopted sanitation codes which regulate septic systems, he said.
In many cases, such as Franklin County, sanitation codes begin a process in which counties eventually develop planning and building codes, which are entwined with water and wastewater issues, he said.
Raw sewage creates a health hazard, he said.
It can also pollute the underground water table and surrounding streams, he said.
"When those things fail, what you have when all this stuff surfaces is that you're putting yourself at the mercy of Mother Nature," Walrod said. "If we get a little rain, it runs over onto your land."
The raw sewage eventually gets into streams, he said.
"And that's everyone's water supply," he said.
Missouri authorities estimate that 70 percent of the state's rural septic systems are inadequate.
Indiana health officials have said one-fourth of that state's rural septic systems could pose a significant health hazard.
For the most part, rural septic systems in Franklin County are in good shape, Walrod said.
There are fewer older, inadequate systems in the county, he said.
Whenever a house changes hands, the septic system has to be inspected and any deficiencies must be corrected, he said.
Over the years, the county sanitation department has found fewer cases of failing or undersized systems during those inspections, he said.
The planning department, which helps property owners plan new septic systems, is often ahead of state regulators in trying new state-of-the-art sanitation systems, he said.
The new systems have been pioneered in other states and have been successful, but the county has waited months for replies from the state about an OK to use them, he said.
When problems with septic systems occur, it's an offshoot of the county's fast growth.
People who move from the city to more sylvan settings continue to use water at the same rate as volume as they did in the city, he said.
They don't realize that when they move to the country, they have to adjust to limits on their water consumption, he said.
"None of them are like me and those other people who grew up hauling water and learned the virtue of being frugal with water," Walrod said.
Unlike city sewer systems, which don't restrict the amount of wastewater a household produces, rural septic systems are designed to handle specific volumes of sewage based on formulas predicting how much sewage the household is expected to generate, he said.
Overtaxing the system dilutes or kills the bacteria in the system and often pushes more untreated effluent out of the system faster, he said.
"After they have to pump out their septic tanks once a month for quite a while, they get to looking at what their water usage is and suddenly the light goes on," Walrod said. "Then they learn to adjust."
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