Fort Wayne’s City Utilities put the Deep Rock Tunnel into operation Thursday, opening the nearly five-mile-long underground tunnel project to intercept sewage mixed with storm water, or combined sewage, and pump it away from the river to be treated.
The St. Marys and Maumee rivers suffer from combined sewage overflow on average of 72 times a year due to heavy rain. The project will keep about 900 million gallons of combined sewage overflow out of the waterways.
City Utilities’ director of engineering, Matthew Wirtz, said the project allows for decades of economic development in the surrounding communities and will have immediate benefits for residents.
“Huge improvements to reductions in basement backups, street flooding kind of all in the center, old core of the city," he said. "We’ll see a lot of benefits from this project.”
The 18-year-long project began with a consent decree between the city and the EPA, requiring that combined sewage cannot overflow into the rivers more than four times a year. Wirtz said this new tunnel will cut down on 94% of that.
While fully operational, there’s still a year left in that 18-year plan to finish up construction under Foster Park. Two hundred and twenty feet below ground, the tunnel has the capacity to move 850 million gallons of combined sewage every day.
