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We the People are building up a $3 billion bill — a government estimate, so it’s probably way under — by the clumsy way we handle rainwater and sewage.

We combine them. Only when it rains really hard, though, a strange excuse. Most of the time, home sewers and street sewers behave themselves properly, in separated systems.

But when it storms, look out. When curbs are streaming and flash floods race down ravines, when highways puddle like lakes, there’s an underground movement we can’t handle.

The combined flows get to be too much for Alcosan, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority. And the excess pours into our rivers. Virtually untreated sewage, ecchh.

If private enterprise dared such behavior, government regulators would be on them in a wolf pack.

But this is a failure of public infrastructure. So we and our politicians show extraordinary patience. Especially since it will cost all of us, in higher sewage rates someday, to bring miles and miles of Pittsburgh-area wastewater systems up to standard.

Still, pollution from industry is way down, and our rivers are cleaner. That’s the good news. It was a heartening counterbalance to some bad news in a public program held a week ago Saturday by a multiagency study project called Three Rivers — Second Nature (3R2N).

"There were no mussels in this river in the 1970s," said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Michael Koryak, looking down at the beautiful blue Monongahela from an excursion boat offshore McKeesport. "Now we’re finding nine species." Actually the water was brown but no more so than the beautiful blue Danube of waltz legend and probably less dangerous to your health.

Koryak and other 3R2N project experts said the Mon can’t aim for drinkable without treatment, but it’s swimmable at many spots now, from a germ-count point of view, in dry weather. (The foolhardy point of view is something else.)

After rain, however, test samples that should be safely under a count of 200 for the sickening E.coli bacteria in a standard water measure grow to 100,000 and more in tributaries like Crooked Run, Dry Run and Turtle Creek. E.coli is a dead giveaway to human and animal wastes. It’s a gauge of how antiquated sewer systems in the 83 communities served by Alcosan can’t contain the trouble anymore. At least after hard rains.

According to Koryak, 43 percent of regional streams are "severely impaired." They’re practically dead. Virtually no aquatic life. But that leaves 57 percent only slightly to moderately impaired. This is not bad as urbanized watersheds go. And sharply better than in the past, when, of course, steel mills and other heavy manufacturing employed hundreds of thousands of workers. So cleaner rivers come as a mixed blessing.

The 3R2N study is a five-year project. Carnegie Mellon University, Alcosan and the Heinz and Pittsburgh foundations are in support, among others.

The goals go beyond the esthetics of purer waters. A major one is to restore a varied population of trees, shrubs, wildflowers, wildlife and recreational humanity along the waters’ edges. Large stretches were taken over by industry in the past but also by aggressive vegetation. Some plants not native to Pennsylvania have learned to love the Mon Valley too much. The most "invasive" are the beautifully named Tree of Heaven and Japanese knotweed. The latter, for instance, makes a pretty flower and behaves itself spreadwise in its home islands. But it has "gone crazy in America! I apologize," said a Carnegie Mellon researcher who hails from Japan.

A number of participants in 3R2N’s luncheon excursion — an annual event, by the way, and free to the public — expressed helplessness towards another juggernaut of public spending headed this way.

That’s the Mon Valley Expressway. It will cost twice what fixing up our sewer systems would. One estimate is $8 billion. And it may not be until the year 2020 that Pennsylvania Turnpike bulldozers and concrete-spreaders will quit clawing through the countryside and possibly isolating miles of regional riverfronts for this monstrosity-in-the-making. But highway building enjoys a political lock. There must be less sex appeal in restoring rivers, now that industry can’t be beaten up anymore.

Significantly, the same Saturday of the 3R2N event witnessed the 13th annual "River Sweep" sponsored by Alcosan and the state. Volunteers in jeans, boots and gloves hoisted trash at more than 50 secret habitats of the litterbug along regional creeks. They filled hundreds of plastic bags, lugged 2,000 discarded tires up the weedy banks to be trucked away.

These are great demonstrations of volunteerism in a region lucky enough to have rivers to love.

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