If everything flows smoothly – bureaucratically, of course – Wareham could become the center of a multi-sewage project aimed at increasing the region's sewage capacity, while decreasing pay pollution and generating cash for Wareham.

The Buzzards Bay Coalition, in cooperation with officials at the town's Water Pollution Control Facility, is seeking federal money to study the feasibility of moving the town’s sewage outflow pipe on the Agawam River to the Cape Cod Canal. The increased discharge capacity would allow the town to expand its treatment facility to accommodate in-town growth and, for a fee, the treatment of sewage from Bourne, Plymouth and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

The expectation is that, if found to be feasible, the project would be funded through grants and state and federal loans.

In early November 2015, the Buzzards Bay Coalition applied for an Environmental Protection Agency coastal restoration grant of $200,000 to conduct a feasibility study on the process of moving the town’s current sewage outflow location from the upper Agawam River to the Mass Maritime Academy on the Cape Cod Canal.

The reason for this move, Coalition Senior Attorney Korrin Petersen said, is to preserve the shallow waters of the Agawam River and the Buttermilk Bay area.

Campinha said the river can only handle up to 1.56 million gallons worth of wastewater, and that the town is fast approaching its limit. This wouldn’t be a problem, said Board of Sewer Commissioners Chairwoman Marilyn Jordan, if the town wasn’t expanding.

“There is growth within Wareham with projects like Walmart and any new companies,” Jordan said. “We could reach capacity within the next five years.”

But the same would not be true, Director of Pollution Control Guy Campinha said, if the outflow pipe is moved to Mass Maritime, because of the “tremendous flushing” in the Cape Cod Canal, meaning the amount of water that moves in and out of the area during high and low tide. With increased flushing comes an increased capacity for discharge water.

“[The Canal] flushes five, six times a day – that’s millions and millions and millions of gallons,” Campinha said. “What we would put into [the Canal] would be manageable for this body of water, but into [the Agawam River], as such a small river, it is significant.”

Petersen said the towns of Bourne, Wareham, and Plymouth, along with the Mass Maritime Academy and the Buzzards Bay Coalition decided to put their collective heads together to find a solution to the unavoidable problem. What they came up with was a shared sewer system, funnelled through the Wareham Wastewater Treatment Facility, that would discharge in the Cape Cod Canal from the Mass Maritime’s current outflow pipe.

If the project goes forward, Jordan said, it would bring a bit of extra money to the town of Wareham, because “the other towns will have to pay us to treat their sewage.”

The Wareham wastewater facility is currently the best-performing treatment plant in all of Buzzards Bay, Petersen said, because it gets the nitrogen levels present in the discharged wastewater the lowest the Coalition has seen baywide. Campinha said the facility gets the nitrogen load down to four parts per million.

Nitrogen causes the growth of plants, and can create massive algal growths that can suffocate fish and other creatures living in water when they die off and suck out all the oxygen.

However, the problem lies with the area into which the water is dispensed. The upper area of the Agawam River, Petersen said, is “a really shallow … sensitive location.”

“It’s a really bad location for wastewater discharge,” Petersen said.

Petersen said Wareham currently treats and dispenses 1.3 million gallons of wastewater per day into the Agawam River. This number is also comprised of about 200,000 homes’ worth of wastewater from homes in the Bourne and Buzzards Bay area.

Should the Coalition get the grant, the plan, Campinha said, would be to do as little uprooting of the community as possible, when it comes to moving the sewage outflow pipe. Instead of running the pipe underneath roads, it would be moved beneath the railroad tracks that run through the town to Mass Maritime Academy. Jordan said they have already approached the state about the idea and that the state has been receptive.

“It’s a big step. They are saying, ‘Okay, we like what you are saying,’ but anything could hold us up,” Jordan said.

In order to accommodate all the sewage coming in from other parts of the bay area, the wastewater treatment facility itself may also have to expand, Campinha said.

Campinha said he hoped the project would also include getting the entire town of Wareham sewered. Currently, Campinha said, only about 60 percent of the town is sewered, and the rest is on septic systems. Though Campinha said he is optimistic that the town could be sewered sooner rather than later, Jordan is not so sure.

“Not in my lifetime – I am 67, and I doubt they will ever be sewered,” Jordan said. “It would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars, and that is not feasible right now.”

Petersen said it was “really impressive” that three communities would come together like this “and say, ‘We all suffer from the same problem, let’s pool our resources, let’s find a way to collaborate and solve our problems together.’”

The project, Petersen said, is still a long way off from completion. The Coalition still has to find out if they got the grant or not; and, after that, must look at several different factors that would affect the project, as well as the area around the proposed project sites.

Jordan said she would love the project to go off without a hitch, but “this is Wareham.”

“If everything went well, in 10 years we could have the pipe in place, but that’s if everything goes perfectly,” Jordan said. “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.”