Beginning July 8, those needing to use the Broadway and Rudisill intersection will likely be better off finding another route as crews continue to make headway on Fort Wayne’s work to clean up the city’s waterways: for nearly a year.
The road will be closed while they build a consolidation sewer which will send storm water and sewage into the Three Rivers Overflow and Protection Tunnel. This particular intersection is the largest in the combined sewer overflows that send 392 million gallons of sewage mixed with stormwater into the St. Marys River every year.
According to city officials, those combined sewer overflow events occur about 72 times a year, during wet weather.
When the weather is dry, the older sewers take both sewage and rainwater to the city’s water treatment plant. But when it rains A LOT, the load becomes too much, and the water is diverted to the rivers.
The tunnel, still under construction with the help of a boring machine christened MamaJo, will provide temporary storage for the combined sewage during these rain events.
For years, city officials have been working under a consent decree to diminish the amount of contaminated water that makes its way to the rivers. The protection tunnel is scheduled to be operational by 2023.
Foster Park will still be open during the road closure, but visitors will have to come from the south.
