Christine Peters and her family settled on the Fox River two decades ago, leaving Chicago to make their home in a summer cottage that had been in her family for years.
Settling into life along the Chain o’ Lakes near Antioch, Peters soon discovered one of the difficulties of turning a summer cottage into a home: a septic system that wasn’t designed to handle all the showers, laundry and dish washing of year-round residents.
While Peters, who replaced her septic system several years ago, has never had a serious problem, she watches her water consumption carefully. She has watched neighbors hauling baskets of clothes to the laundermat and heard horror stories about sewage standing in yards and backing up into basements and bathrooms.
In an effort to find a cost-effective solution to their septic problems, Peters and residents of more than two dozen other subdivisions joined forces in the early 1990s, creating the United Homeowners Association of Unincorporated Antioch.
“We love living here,” said Peters, president of the group, which represents more than 40 developments. “We just want to make this problem go away.”
The Lake County Health Department is looking at a potential solution: instituting a comprehensive management plan for decentralized wastewater systems as an alternative to, or in combination with, sanitary sewer systems.
Under the proposed plan, individual septic systems would be evaluated, and upgraded or replaced as appropriate. A public or private utility would manage the system, and all homeowners would have to do is pay a monthly bill.
Robert Rubin, a visiting scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was scheduled to talk with area residents about on-site system management models and his work with the EPA developing national standards for the management of such systems.
The Health Department said Rubin is familiar with the challenges Antioch’s small lots and marginal soils pose to wastewater treatment.
Anthony Smithson, manager of the Lake County Health Department’s Individual Sewage Disposal Program, said many of the homes in the area were built in the 1920s and ’30s as summer cottages and have since become full-time residences.
The homes, built on small lots close to the water, have septic systems that weren’t built to handle the use of washing machines and dishwashers on a year-round basis.
It isn’t just a homeowner headache; an overburdened septic system can send sewage into nearby waterways, making it a public health and environmental issue.
Sewers would seem to be the simple answer, but hooking the homes into an existing sewer system is expensive and could cost homeowners as much as $20,000 apiece, Smithson said.
It’s not that septic systems are a bad thing, Smithson added.
A 1997 EPA report found that septic systems are at least as good at handling wastewater as sewer systems. The problem is maintenance.
Homeowners often neglect to pump out the septic tank and air compressors, and pumps and timers can break down. The Health Department’s proposal would solve that issue, he said, by putting the maintenance of the septic system in the hands of the utility.
The comprehensive management plan Smithson is proposing is still in the discussion stage. Though it has been implemented successfully in other parts of the country, Smithson said, there are several logistical and regulatory issues that would need to be worked out before the plan could be put into place in Illinois.
