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And not knowing how big a problem that is can make it difficult to clean them up.

For that reason, heath and environmental experts are applauding Carnegie Mellon University's new $1 million center designed to analyze the region's water from an engineering standpoint and determine the most effective way to use limited cleanup resources.

"We have some major problems related to storm water and sewage running into the rivers and creeks in this area," said Gerry Barron, deputy director of the Allegheny County Health Department and president of the Pennsylvania Public Health Association. "To have a center at CMU looking into this and asking questions I think is great."

Joe Ramus, a professor of biological oceanography at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, has monitored North Carolina's water quality for more than five years and predicts that CMU's Center for Water Quality in Urban Environmental Systems -- known as WaterQUESt -- will be used to address water quality issues throughout the nation.

"It certainly is needed, not only for your area of the country, but for the country as a whole," Ramus said.

Compared to those in other cities, Pittsburgh's rivers have more days of limited water recreation because of sewers overflowing into the streams. The region also is one of the nation's worst for abandoned mine drainage problems; it has a legacy of toxic industrial pollution and a federal order to map and repair a complicated sewer system.

It makes the perfect microcosm to study urban water quality, said Dave Dzombak, a civil and environmental engineering professor and co-head of the center.

"We're working on problems of national interest, but our findings will be relevant to local regulatory issues," Dzombak said.

Most of the money the university initially granted the center is being spent to upgrade and buy new laboratory equipment to measure the level of contaminants in the rivers, and study how they change as conditions such as rainfall, temperature and water flow increase and decrease, said Jeanne VanBriesen, a civil and environmental engineering professor who co-heads the center.

"We have, for a long time, controlled and used water, but we haven't always understood water and the paths it follows," VanBriesen said. "We'd like to be able to know a source of water all the way through to its consumption."

In deciding whether to run up its Combined Sewer Overflow flags -- which warn people that waterways might have elevated levels of dangerous bacteria -- the county health department simply looks at whether it's raining.

Most rainfalls overwhelm the region's water treatment system and that water, along with the sewage normally in the treatment system, will be diverted directly to the rivers. The health department issued 47 overflow days during this year's 135-day summer recreation season.

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