yeah but when there's enough rain for a CSO, what you're seeing is like 0.1% or less doo doo by volume (ddbv) compared to the insane amount of water contained in a rainstorm.

a 1-inch rainstorm deposits a little over a billion gallons of water, just in the city limits (27,154 gallons per acre, 40,040 acres in the CoR). The entire flow of the james river is 1.8 billion gallons per day.

So a 1 inch rainstorm dumps the equivalent of the entire james river's flow for about 12-13 hours into our sewer system.

The state of virginia estimates the average person generates 75 gallons of sewage every day. With a population of 226,000, lets use the number 100 gallons per person per day. That comes to 22 million gallons of water. 22 million into 1 billion is about 2.2 percent.

And that 100 gallon figure includes grey and black water. So the vast majority of it is going to be from your shower, dishwasher, washing machine, and sink. Unless you personally produce 100 gallons of feces in a day, I think its safe to say the average person produces less than 1 gallon of actual waste in a day.

Which brings the final number to about 226,000 gallons of actual doodoo out of 1 billion gallons of rainwater = not all that much doodoo, really.

I mean I definitely wouldn't drink it, but I bet it actually is cleaner than the water that's already in the james (and has accumulated runoff from farms upstream).