October 2025 - NEW Water was featured in the Green Bay Press Gazette, regarding NEW Water's Downtown Interceptors Renewal Project, see story below.
To read their full publication, please visit: What are those black pipes doing in downtown Green Bay? | greenbaypressgazette.com >>
By: Jesse Lin
Reader question: There are so many black pipes along Main Street. What are they even for? More important is when are they going to go away? They are taking up so much of the sidewalk.
Answer: Sewage must keep flowing while a $29 million project rehabilitating downtown Green Bay’s nearly century-old sewers still has a year to go. The alternative is unthinkable.
The snaking, double-barrel shotgun-like black pipes erupting from and burrowing back into the ground along Main Street and the East River by Saint Clair Street are the temporary guarantee that wastewater keeps moving.
Temporary, in this case, means that the pipes may rear their heads, disappear, and reappear like Whac-A-Mole elsewhere as a year-long fixture of the downtown's landscape.
James Brunette, assistant director of public works, told the Improvement and Services Committee on Oct. 1, "How you're seeing them today is what they're going to have for the next, roughly, year for the construction period,” referring to the anticipated end to the work in October 2026.
Until that date, NEW Water, Green Bay’s wastewater operator, expects some disruptions to daily life. Where the black pipes run along Main Street, NEW Water has forecast sidewalk and trail closures, as well as detoured traffic; along where the black pipes run along the East River, the wastewater operator has anticipated disturbances to parks, trails, driveways, and sidewalks.
Such time taken will be to work on the main sewer arteries that collect sewage and direct the wastewater to the treatment plant. Called interceptors, some were built during the Great Depression. Some are 60 inches wide, essentially concrete tunnels. Much has corroded within them. There’s buildup hanging like stalactites from within, according to photos from a one-page explainer of the project. There are rags, wipes, and trash that have collected in 200-foot masses, according to an Aug. 22 construction update.
To keep the interceptors from further deterioration, NEW Water’s installing what’s technically called a “Cured-in-Place Pipe” or CIPP.
Brunette described vividly the CIPP to the Improvement and Services Committee.
“You’re taking a, for lack of a better term, like a fiberglass sock,” he said. “You’re wetting it out with resin, putting it inside of the pipe and inflating it like a balloon so it’s up tight against the existing walls. And then you run steam or hot water through it and that activates the resin, and now you basically have a new pipe inside of the old pipe.”
To install the new lining, the wastewater in the interceptors must be “evacuated,” as Brunette put it. An earthen pit with pumps near East High School where the black pipes begin is where Brunette said he believed the wastewater was being sucked out, then diverted by the pipes in a temporary sewer bypass system.
NEW Water's executive director Nathan Qualls specified that the bypass pipes were diverting sewage to a downstream manhole. The entire sewer system was not going through those bypass pipes, though; only parts that were being rehabilitated. As the work moves to other parts of the interceptors, Qualls said workers will evaluate whether to keep a bypass pipe in place or relocate to other parts of downtown.
NEW Water released a construction update the week after Brunette’s comments to the Improvement and Services Committee for the bypass pipes currently along Main Street and the East River.
The system will run every day at all hours, according to the Oct. 10 construction update. Some ambient noise is expected. The system was "essential for maintaining continuous wastewater services during the renewal work,” the update said.
This portion of the project, according to the update, would last “approximately three months," until January.