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Fort Wayne sewer overflow project nearing its end

The view from the bottom of the beginning of the tunnel designed to keep storm water from flooding the city's wastewater treatment plant.
Rebecca Green
/
WBOI
The view from the bottom of the beginning of the tunnel designed to keep storm water from flooding the city's wastewater treatment plant.

Fort Wayne City Council is bidding out the final leg of a federally mandated ongoing effort to reduce combined sewer overflow into the city’s rivers.

According to the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, Council will discuss an ordinance approving an almost $7.5 million sewer project.

The project is part of a consent decree Fort Wayne entered into with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Justice Department and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management in 2008, after being ordered to control the amount of pollution entering the city's waterways.

The consent decree aims to reduce Fort Wayne’s combined sewage overflow into the rivers by installing consolidation sewers that will direct sewage overflow away from the rivers and into a massive tunnel before it is then sent through a sewage treatment plant.

The City of Fort Wayne has already installed the tunnel and drop shaft to carry flows from the surface to the tunnel. Five other consolidation sewers are finished with two others under construction. City officials say this project at Superior Street is the last project to be bid

The project up for discussion on Tuesday involves roadwork on Superior Street from Jackson Street to Harrison Street and includes installing about 2,000 linear feet of consolidation sewer.

Tony Sandleben joined the WBOI News team in September of 2022.