Are there other options when it rains? I imagine they're not dumping sewage into rivers for fun.
As expensive as this project is, separating the storm drains from the sewage lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_sewer) in an existing system is much more costly.
There was a ton of work done to reduce the amount of water ending up in the sewer during storms followed by some large infrastructure improvements to improve the carrying capacity of the sewer itself.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68464798
I think there's a B1M episode on Youtube that has a good overview.