The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority may have been caught loving that dirty water a little too much, as its board has halted a proposal that clean water advocates fear would dump sewage into the Charles River forever.

The MWRA Board of Directors has tabled its upcoming vote, scheduled for Wednesday, on whether to reclassify the Charles as a water body that allows for maximum sewage overflows.

This comes after the Charles River Watershed Association and other clean-water advocates slammed the MWRA for considering the option to address a decades-old problem of combined sewer overflows, or CSOs.

These systems collect stormwater and household and industrial waste in the same pipes, destined for treatment plants. But it allows rain to overwhelm the system and dump sewage contamination

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