DES MOINES, Iowa — The years-long projects to fix Des Moines’ sewer system are almost done. The Ingersoll Run Project is wrapping up its final stage to eliminate the combined sanitary and storm water sewer system.

In the last stretch of this that started in November, they’ve been putting in a 5-foot diameter sewer near Locust St. and on to MLK Jr. Pkwy.

The project will help prevent overflow during heavy rainfall and to help eliminate future sewage overflow into the Des Moines River.

“The way it affects the everyday persons? Yeah, when we get the heavy rain events, the sewer system usually got overloaded and low areas or basement backups that shouldn’t happen,” Des Moines WRA Director and Assistant Public Works Director Scott Hutchens said. “Now that we’ve done that, the water quality in the rivers will be better because we’re not discharging any sanitary flow into the river. It’s just supposed to be storm water or flow. Some of the combined flow does still go down to the treatment plant, and that gets treated and discharged in the river down here. But up here where the Icon Trails Project is being built, there’s no combined sewer overflows here anymore.”

Sewer systems in Des Moines were constructed over 150 years ago as combined sewers, so there has been a lot of advancement since then and realization about what works and what doesn’t. The area has certainly seen a lot of flooding, like the historic 2018 rainstorm.

“Well, we’ve had combined sewer overflows in Des Moines for a long time. The original sewer system was built back in the 1870s, and it was a combined system. Just everything went into the same pipe. And then as we built out, we continued to separate those. But then we had this mandate to get, we had about 12 or 14 combined sewer overflows, and now we’re down to just one that is actually permitted down at the treatment plant,” Hutchens said. “This project started in the early 2000s. Obviously you can’t pay for everything at once so we had a plan for 10-15 years. We budgeted it and got the final one done here just this week.”

The projects to fix this problem have cost $300 million over the last 25 years.

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