Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Sewage Happens
If there is a front line in the war on sewage, it?s people like Paul O?Grady, owner of O?Grady plumbing in San Francisco
O?GRADY..Play for me? Now I run my camera a little further, and I see another break?
O?Grady is showing me a video clip from his greatest hits of broken sewage pipes.
O?GRADY We?re looking inside a 12- inch sewer main that is completely broken with roots. Amy: That are actually growing into the pipe? O?Grady: Oh yeah, definitely.
This is just one tiny -- but typical -- slice of the vast subterranean network beneath our feet. There are some 900 miles of pipe under San Francisco alone. They link every house, business, public bathroom, water fountain, and school. Some of them date back to the Gold Rush. And many of them are a mess.
OGRADY That ball of roots is so massive that I actually have to use a shovel?and there?s even more roots and I don?t make it much further.
And neither, in this case, does the sewage.
Ambi: some little tiny sound from the sewage tape?
Here?s what?s supposed to happen.
Ambi: toilet, sink.
You flush the toilet, you run the sink. Whatever goes down the drain travels through the pipes and to a sewage treatment plant. There, they filter out everything solid, and then disinfect what?s left with chemicals. Finally, that much cleaner water is released into the Bay. But if sewage pipes are broken, two things can happen. One: the sewage never makes it to the plant.
CHOKSI You?re seeing sewage running down the street. It?s kind of like a third world country.
That?s Sejal Choksi, an attorney with the environmental group Baykeeper. They?re suing cities across the Bay Area - most recently, Burlingame - to force them to fix their aging sewage systems.
CHOKSI You?ve got such old systems and they?re being poorly maintained, that more over the next few years you?ll be hearing about sewage spills in the streets, in people?s backyards, in parks.
But broken sewage pipes don?t just let sewage out. They let water water seep in. That?s what happened in Mill Valley. During a storm, a treatment plant can get up to 15 times more water than usual and, too often, it?s more than it can handle all at once.
CHOKSI CUT: ?OR? In many instances, they have to just bypass their treatment plant entirely and dump the mixed rain and wastewater into a body of water, like the San Francisco Bay.
And, dumping sewage into the bay harms fish and can make swimmers sick. So the pipes need to be fixed. But what would that cost?
Ambi: pencil scratching? That?s -- I should have this number handy?times ding ding ding?
This is Tom Mumley. He?s with the Regional Water Quality Control Board, which oversees all the sewage plants in the Bay Area.
MUMLEY So a quick calculation - say I had 500,000 houses that have had to have their sewer lateral fixed and it could cost ten thousand dollars t fix it, that adds up to a price tag of five billion dollars.
Fixing just the pipes on private property alone, in other words, would cost about $700 for every man, woman and child living in the entire nine-county Bay Area. And, it?s not just the pipes that need fixing.
LOICANO We?re gonna take you out and look at the digesters..
Jon Loicano (loy AH ko no) is with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which runs the city?s sewage system.
Ambi: walking on metal gangway
He?s taken us up to walk on the roof of a giant, cylindrical sewage digester in Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.
LOICANO If you come stick your head in there, you can kind of smell it. (sound of lid opening)
Digesters work a lot like your own stomach - they heat up the filtered materials, swoosh them around, and add bacteria to help break it down. And you'd recognize the byproduct, too.
Ambi: gas hiss (A COUPLE OF THESE TO CHOOSE FROM). ?uck!? ?it?s got that sulfur, rotten egg smell.
These digesters are more than half a century old, and they look it. Mumley says the weakest links are the metal lids that float on top of the sludge. Here?s what happened during a heavy rain storm back in 1996.
Ambi: [CUT ?AND SO?] Water ponded up inside the bottom of the cover and the thing just folded like a piece of tin, [OPTIONAL: like if you took a piece of tin and just folded it. That?s what happened to the cover.]
Loicano may be a sewage guy, but he works downtown and wears a suit and tie. That's because it?s his job to convince the city to spend over two billion dollars to fix San Francisco?s digesters and other equipment. It?s not always an easy sell.
LOICANO [THIS NEEDS EDITING HELP AT BOTH ENDS] It?s hard for any city to ask for money to do infrastructure stuff because people aren?t used to the fact that things are working. And until a failure, they just don?t see it happening. [[CUT? So it?s just about how much of an impact it has on people.]]
We've made big improvements before. Last time we was in the early 70s, after Congress passed the Clean Water Act, requiring billions of dollars of upgrades to sewage treatment plants all over the country. And, says Tom Mumley with the Water Board, it worked.
MUMLEY Before then, discharges of untreated wastewater were very common - to the point that it stunk. People often complained when driving across the Bay Bridge that they could smell sewage.
The Bay may not stink like it used to, but its not as clean s it should be, says Mumley. He says fixing the entire system could cost tens of billions of dollars. And the longer the wait, the bigger the bill.
For Quest, I?m Amy Standen, KQED Radio News.
