Wrote EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to California Governor Gavin Newsome, quoted in "EPA tells California it is ‘failing to meet its obligations’ to protect the environment" (WaPo).
San Francisco officials reject the idea that they have failed to capture objects such as needles because they send sewage and street runoff to the same pipes. This combined discharge is treated at one of the city’s sewage treatment plants, where pollutants are captured or treated before being released to the San Francisco Bay or the Pacific Ocean.In terms of excrement flowing into the bay, it’s not absolutely ridiculous.
“We have our challenges in San Francisco around homelessness,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s communications director, Jeff Cretan, said in response to Trump’s comments aboard Air Force One. “But in terms of needles flowing into the bay, it’s absolutely ridiculous.”
San Francisco is one of the few major cities with sewers that combine stormwater and sewage flows that is not operating under a federal consent decree.
Drawing on public databases and press reports — including a NPR report in August that “piles of human feces” are now visible on sidewalks and streets in San Francisco — Wheeler noted that even California’s own government has posted studies noting that human waste can increase bacteria levels in water off its beaches.
He detailed a litany of federal water quality violations across the state, saying California “has not acted with a sense of urgency to abate this public health and environmental problems.”
The examples include a “years-long practice” of San Francisco routinely discharging more than a billion gallons of combined sewage and stormwater annually into San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean without treating it for biological contaminants....
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71 comments:
"Lawmakers have been fighting to read the complaint for nearly two weeks; on Wednesday afternoon, it was finally transmitted to them." Love that. I am surprised to learn that Vox cannot be trusted.
What might the article have said, if it were not trying to mislead the reader? "There was pressure from some Congressmen to read the complaint for nearly two weeks, but the Trump administration refused - a frequent disagreement between this administration and this Congress. When the issue became public, the Trump administration immediately released both the transcript and the complaint."
Destroys lives: meh.
Destroys the economy: meh.
Destroys property values: meh.
Destroys any concept of property at all: meh.
Destroys aesthetics: meh.
Destroys public peace: meh.
Destroys public safety: meh.
Destroys public health: meh.
Destroys the environment: OMFG OMFG OMFG Oh Oh Oh we have to do something nooooowwwwww, srsly you guys.
“The smelliest Summer I ever spent was the entire year of 2019 in San Francisco.”
—- Samuel Clemens
In terms of excrement flowing into the bay, it’s not absolutely ridiculous.
"But it's really diverse shit Mrs. Preski."
Alinsky Rule #4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
Trump is amazing!
I was in downtown LA in August - it was like the slums in any Central American country. There were tents, homeless, addicts rummaging around the sidewalks.. There was construction blocking off the streets. There was garbage everywhere. It was hotter than hell. I thought I was in Honduras or something.
Stay on the West side!
"What diluted sewage looks like.’ American River in Sacramento tainted with feces"
Trump should push for restoration Hetch Hetchy.
Restore Hetch Hetchy
Per John Muir, it was as spectacular as Yosemite. It’s next to it.
It was damned in 1913, and is in a national park.
James Watt also proposed this.
It’s a water reservoir for the sf area.
Another reservoir should be dug to replace it.
It actual makes financial sense.
By all mean, let's show more concern about the environment that about these lost souls living in the street.
In terms of excrement flowing into the bay, it’s not absolutely ridiculous.
Sittin' on the dock of the bay,
Watching the turds float away...
I love that the EPA is being used against the societal breakdown found in deep blue Dem controlled cities.
Apparently Democrat administrations at the state and municipal levels don’t have to obey no stinkin’ EPA regulations.
Bahahahahhahhaha…...Who RUNS those cities?? Too bad they keep electing people who don't care.
What were California Democrats supposed to say, “Oh, sorry, we have been braying incessantly about the environment, so we will get right on this?”
Fat chance.
Alinsky rules applied to progressives. Wow. It would only be better if the letter started: "We noted your banning of plastic straws to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the ocean, which led us to examine your current practices in regard to other potential ocean contamination sources.
As usual. LOOK CLIMATE CHANGE SQUIRREL!!! While they ignore the tougher business of actually doing their jobs.
“California is what America is going to look like,” he told a television interviewer. “California is America’s coming attraction.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA)
https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2019/07/08/is-california-the-future-of-america-or-an-increasingly-failed-state/
I took one field trip in law school. It was to the SF sewage treatment plant. It was explained to us that the storm water does indeed get treated prior to discharge into the bay or ocean, except during exceptional storms or breakdowns of the facility. All other Northern California cities are vulnerable to Trump's complaint, though.
Oh no, EPA is trying to influence Trump's election chances in California. Impeach!
I don't know if this has since been fixed but storm drains to Santa Monica from skid row were huge problem also and LA elected to pay fines rather than spend money to comply with law.
The reference below has dozens of pictures of the refuse strewn about by the homeless. There's many pictures of needles on the beaches. There's a picture of drain which empties directly into San Francisco Bay. I think the San Fran people are arguing that the needles are there because the homeless drop them directly on the beach but that the needles in the storm drains get filtered out. Possibly, but since the filtration plant wasn't set up to catch thousands upon thousands of needles I'd like to see the claim that the filtration is working investigated. In any case the beaches are ruined by these needles but California regards itself as a model for the country. A model of how we can Make America Venezuela?
https://coastodian.org/tag/needles-in-sf-bay/
This is Ridiculous!
Dropping human waste, and pollutants (including Medical waste) into bodies of water has NO effect on our environment. THE ONLY THING that can adversely effect our environment is CO2
Right? I mean, RIGHT?
Combined sanitary sewers and storm drains work when it is not raining (except for the stink coming from all the curb inlets), but no sewage system can handle the runoff from a rainstorm. The pipe system is provided with overflow locations where the excess flow - turds and all - is dumped into creeks and channels leading to some lake or, on the coast, the sea.
I thought this was supposed to be a thing of the past. There is a Federal law and program, at least 60 years old, that is supposed to force local municipalities to eliminate such systems.
San Francisco officials reject the idea that they have failed to capture objects such as needles because they send sewage and street runoff to the same pipes. This combined discharge is treated at one of the city’s sewage treatment plants, where pollutants are captured or treated before being released to the San Francisco Bay or the Pacific Ocean.
So, the much-brayed-about ban on plastic straws was a meaningless virtue signal. Good to know.
I walked by a giant steaming pile of human feces yesterday on my way to a meeting in SOMA. "Great job Brownie" was all I could think. But at least the city will soon be rid of the scourge of e-cigarettes and advertising. Crisis averted!
Ray is absolutely right- this is Trump using Alinsky against San Francisco. If the EPA is going to exist, then the rules need to be followed by everyone. It isn't like San Francisco is poor and can't afford proper water treatment, nor is the like California itself is poor and can't help San Francisco.
San Francisco is really bad by City Hall. There's probably a 10 block radius of a lotta ugly shit.
However, if you hang in Pacific Heights with the Pelosi, Feinstein, Harris, Newsom, Willie Brown crowd -- well, life is pretty good.
Say, what's the common denominator of all these folks......
50 TONS of Homeless trash was cleaned up in 9 hours by 200 conservatives. They’re going back to Baltimore for the 3rd time.
LA won’t do it. SF won’t do it.
Some prog cities are cesspools because “they care.”
A Baby Ruth cleared the pool in Caddyshack.....
A Baby Ruth cleared the pool in Caddyshack.....
Akron, Ohio is one of those cities that dumps sewage and storm water into nearby waterways. In this case, the Cuyahoga River. The city of Akron is paying a large amount of money to change the way it handles sewage and storm water under threat by the EPA. Why should San Francisco get away with it? They have a lot more rich people than Akron, Ohio. Don't they pay taxes?
The LA Times is certain that Trump is heading for an election disaster in California
I'm not so sure. California is crazy but maybe not that crazy,
More illegal immigrants is the answer to homelessness, combined with regulations making the building of new housing extremely difficult.
Tough nuts California. You made your bed.. now sleep in it (fleas, poop, rats, trash, and all.)
So the streets where you live and walk are not the environment? Excrement and needles are OK there, just make sure the fish don't have to deal with it. Are the Dems planning on getting sea creature the right to vote? I can imagine bundles of absentee ballots from sardines being delivered in the trunks of Prius drivers. Pun intended.
The Dems have a way of always putting their own constituents last.
The "leaders" of the City-And-County of San Francisco appear to hope for the fulfillment of Lenin's maxim: "Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth".
That appears to be vastly common among all the members of the Socialist-Democratic Party.
I'm a little puzzled by the statements: "pollutants are captured or treated" and "without treating it for biological contaminants". It seems that they separate and treat the water/waste, but don't treat it for "biological contaminants" before releasing it into the bay or ocean.
IOW- they could treat it but don't.
I don't understand how any city that mixes storm water and sewage could ever treat that. You'd have to design a water treatment plant with the surge capacity of a major storm. I suppose you could consider that a major rainfall dilutes the sewage to the point where you don't care, but that sounds like the pre-70s approach everywhere.
Reminds me of a early 70s canoe trip down the Yellowstone. My brother caught a big rainbow trout just below Livingston, and when we cleaned it, we checked out the stomach contents to see what they were feeding on. A whole bunch of corn kernels. Put us right off our feed.
Apparently San Francisco needs more Tea Party rallies.
I'm not so sure. California is crazy but maybe not that crazy.
I'm sure. But so what?
The "leaders" of the City-And-County of San Francisco appear to hope for the fulfillment of Lenin's maxim: "Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth".
It was Goebbels, not Lenin.
The old center cities in RI had combined storm/sanitary sewers. It was disgusting after any significant rainstorm. The solution was using tunnel borers to create deep storage so the excess runoff could be processed after the rains stopped. It worked well. Cost - $500+ million so far and up to $800 million more to do a follow-on phase. This is all financed by sewer fees, not by the rest of the state or the Feds.
In comparison, the cost is an insignificant fraction of the cost of California's gold-plated high-speed rail system. If California can afford to squander the money on that boondoggle, they can afford an abatement system that can address the problem without tearing up the streets. Maybe Musk's Boring Company be of service.
CCSF has problems, but needles and shit flowing into the Bay isn't one.
Solids like needles, "flushable" wipes, dead rats, wood, and such are removed here with bar screens or bar racks (same thing; there are several in several locations). There is something that looks like a 20 ft. long billet grill mounted sideways that screens out that stuff, with a comb-like device that pulls the screened material up and, usually, over the top where it falls into a dumpster.
Human waste solids (shit) travel with the water through a series of settling tanks, from where it is collected and sent to a digester (methane is generated by bacteria breaking the waste down plus a lot of other chemical actions), then water is removed and the resulting 'cake' is sent to fertilize alfalfa fields and such (no people food- yet).
When a storm occurs, the water is diverted to fill "boxes" (the Embarcadero, for one); streets laid atop large rectangular concrete tunnels. These are allowed to fill, and the accumulated water runs through the same treatment as normal. It may take a day or so after the rain.
If rain pours and pours faster than that, it can be discharged as overflow- but is still treated with chlorine to kill biologicals, and retreated with sodium bisulfite to deactivate the remaining hypo (sodium hypochloride, industrial strength bleach) to prevent killing fish and other sea life. Solids contaminants are removed by bar racks before this, too.
We PUC employees don't like the sidewalk situation and sketchy homeless blocking access to equipment (and occasionally threatening city employees), either.
Blogger mockturtle said...By all mean, let's show more concern about the environment that about these lost souls living in the street.9/26/19, 10:07 AM
Really, "...lost souls..." your naivete is astounding. Yet, I bet your a Democrat. Such Liberal politicians are [have] destroying the State of California. I'm a resident of L.A., been here for over 30 + years and have witnessed it first hand. Wait for 2 calamitous events in this State. The 1st event, public pension collapse, is happening nationwide, but California takes the lead, thanks to its massive pension debt. CA voters have approved many Bond Issues. However,the funds where used largely to support retired public employees pension obligations. Not for schools, not for roads, etc. The 2nd event is the collapse of CA's electricity grid and its ill founded strategy of solar and wind. Just look at the disasters in Europe, Spain and Germany, because of their "Green Power" lies. Last year was the first year CA received the majority of it's power from out of state. Brownouts have been a monthly event in CA. It will chase businesses out of state. As a result of these two issues, this state is fast approaching 3rd and 4th world level.
wildswan- Berkeley is not SF. Take a tour here and see how contaminants are removed. I can't do anything about addicts on the beach, even in SF..
Tomcc, Hagar- everything normally gets treated. If the rain is too much (almost never), the overflows are alarmed and the City pays serious fines.
robother- normal operation is 1/5 of capacity. We run at capacity during and after storms.
The city of which Bernie Sanders was once mayor has an inadequate sewage system which is dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated sewage into a beautiful lake nestled between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains. But they have gigabit ethernet paid for on the public dime. Well, I think they may have stiffed some creditors along the way on that one.
“The solution to pollution is dilution.” Or at least that’s what they used to say in the seventies.
I have liberal friend who lives near Haight Ashbury that just got a citation from the city for bottles of urine and trash that have been collecting on the side of his co-op from the army of homeless that traipse through his neighborhood. Boy is he pissed. Great to see the city take no responsibility for not enforcing vagrancy and public defecation laws and sliding the costs on to the residents. GOOD!
It's a gotcha move, so wrong on that count.
Fifty years ago, the combined sewer/storm drain on East Oakland Ave. in dear old Bloomington began at the upper end with a 48" RCP which reduced down to a 36" RCP with an overflow structure to Sugar Creek and then farther along reduced to a 24" RCP with another overflow to Sugar Creek. The director of public works told me that this was OK, because when it rained the overflow was so diluted that it did not matter. I said, well, if that is so, what are all those big fat rats down along Sugar Creek doing there and what is all that nasty grey matter and scum along the banks? So he went harrumph harrumph and walked off.
Some time after I left town, Bloomington got a big Federal grant to separate the sanitary sewers from the storm drains, and they learned another lesson. That was a big enough project that a contractor came down from South Chicago and won the bidding. He did the job, collected his money, and left, but then the city had to come up with another multi-million dollar project to repair and clean up behind him. They had not thought to show and specify this as requirements in the original project since the local contractor who did almost all city work had always just taken it for granted that he should do that as a good citizen of the town, but the guy from Chicago had just laughed at that notion.
“... human waste can increase bacteria levels in water off its beaches“
Poop everywhere is bad for more than just the beaches. The bacteria gets into the air and on you and your clothes and shoes, in your car, etc.
It’s like city streets from 1895 all over again, this time with human shit instead of horseshit covering public streets and walkways, in the name of “progress”.
Public sanitation is the absolutely key distinction between civilization and the disease, lower life expectancy, and other effects of poor sanitation.
Read the excellent book “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Dr Paul Farmer who describes his heroic efforts to bring clean water to Third World countries like Haiti. You won’t take clean water for granted, ever again.
o_o,
Thanks for your insight. You're saying that the water is being treated for biological contaminants. Any idea about what the EPA administrator is referring?
Ya know, there’s a whole lotta insanely rich people in the Bay Area who could probably come up with a billion dollars...minimum, to clean all that crap (Heh) up without even noticing it was gone.
I’ve been to SF and LA multiple times in the last three months. Those people, the elected officials and the cretins that vote for them are a disgrace. Clean up your shit assholes.
Homelessness: another of those myriad problems that would go away in a generation if we just limited all the rampant breeding.
I used to live in SF in an area called "the Sunset". It is right along beach and is a popular break point for surfers. It has a city sewage outlet that dumps "treated human waste" a couple of hundred yards into the ocean and it routinely puts out warnings to surfers to stay away from the beaches, particularly during storm season because the amount of raw human sewage that gets dumped in from the combination storm/sanitary lines in the city. A friend who still lives there says the warnings are constant now and not just during storm season. Yikes. Its like the middle ages all over again.
Homelessness: another of those myriad problems that would go away in a generation if we just limited all the rampant breeding.
Tomcc, I think it's the female hormones in the water. Basically the current water treatment technology doesn't take care of it. So after the sewage is treated the clean water along with the hormones are released into the water supply.
hstad: FYI, I'm not only not a Democrat but am a Trump-loving American Conservative. My point was that, to the Progs, the 'environment' could be concern but a solution to the people in the street is not. The homeless [those living on the street] all need to be rounded up and confined somewhere until they can be triaged and treated for whatever it is that keeps them on the street. Anything less is lip service only.
Oh, and 'hstad', I'm sorry to hear you live in CA. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Olympia, WA, has a significant street population with the usual issues. The decided to acknowledge the problem by placing porta-potties and needle disposal boxes where they are likely to be used, and are used. This is a no-brainer. The only reason a person will defecate in public is if there are no places available. I proposed this to the Seattle City Council thirty years ago. Yawn.
Low cost remedy with direct results that produces contracts to local vendors. Lots of these toilet systems have haz-mat boxes inside. It's a win-win strategy.
The LA Times is certain that Trump is heading for an election disaster in California.
Eh... so what? He's not going to win the state, and with the way the electoral college works 51% and 99% are the same. From a political standpoint Trump is doing the right thing by alienating Californians if it gets him votes in purple states.
The real question is why does beating on CA get him votes in other states.
Take it, Tony,
I left my turds in San Francisco
High on a hill they stink for thee
I remember visiting SF in the early eighties and remarking that it was about the cleanest American city I had been in.(Using Boston, NYC, Chicago as primary comparisons). It is hard for me to imagine the residents of that city have allowed it to descend to this level, but apparently it is inarguable. So much of this traces back to the "decision" that the mentally ill should not be institutionalized. I don't remember the arguments at the time but, whatever they were, time has proven them to be wrong.
Daniel Jackson @7:28: Don't you see what you are promoting? The inmates are running the asylum.
...bundles of absentee ballots from sardines being delivered in the trunks of Prius drivers.
Friday and time for Florida Woman.
Tomcc- Wheeler's letter has a lot of generalities and inaccuracies, but it is correct (but unspecific) about raw sewage overflows at certain manhole covers.
There are overflows duroong most heavy rain events along Cuyoga Avenue, which used to be a creek bed. It is a low point in the system, and it would cost around $15 - $20 million to remedy.
The 'billions' of gallons of untreated water is way off. I don't on what underlings' reports the EPA letter is based.
0_0
Thanks for the on the ground perspective. According to an interview with McClatchy.com, California also has more than 130 air quality plans that they and the EPA had jointly previously ignored. It isn't poop and needles, an issue that tends to focus people's attention very directly. Given the on-going argument over who has the say on air quality, CARB or the EPA, the sewerage problem may just serve to uncover the 130+ air quality violations California has chosen to ignore. Alinsky Rule #4.
As to the sewerage issue, take a look at the Narragansett Bay Commission fix for their more severe problem with a much more costly solution. It was one of the very few infrastructure repair/upgrades that was done and was worthwhile during the decades I lived in RI.
San Francisco is one of the few major cities with sewers that combine stormwater and sewage flows that is not operating under a federal consent decree.
Gee, I wonder how San Fran escaped as "one of the few." Does "Pelosi" ring a bell?
Wouldn't it be fun to find out what OTHER cities are NOT under Fed decrees....
Wouldn't it be fun to find out what OTHER cities are NOT under Fed decrees....
Hmmm...Baltimore?
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