America's aging sewer systems continue to dump human waste into rivers and streams, despite years of fines and penalties targeting publicly owned agencies responsible for sewage overflows, a Gannett News Service analysis shows.

The analysis of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data found that since 2003, hundreds of municipal sewer authorities have been fined for violations, including spills that make people sick, threaten local drinking water and kill aquatic animals and plants.

An EPA 2004 report to Congress estimated that 850 billion gallons of storm water mixed with raw sewage pour into U.S. waters every year from older, combined sewer systems that were designed to overflow in wet weather. These combined systems, built by cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, are now considered antiquated and a threat to public health and the environment, according to the EPA and environmental groups.

This is how you know when an empire is about to fall: it pays more attention to external factors, like symbolic enemies, than it does to internal factors, like the fact that the sewer systems are outdated and pose a danger to public health. We're too busy chasing terrorists and voting, that we forget the immediate critical problems we need to face as a nation.

Simple logic: what goes in, must come out. We can't fill the water with contraceptives, pills and other chemical products that later end up in the drinking water and change our hormones. Maybe we'll look like zombies in 200 years? You know, I don't care; as far as I'm concerned, we're already trained zombies and we sold our brains to TV long ago. Right now we need to think about how to avoid becoming more zombified than we already are.