The Excellent Adventure

OK folks, I am losing my sense of humor here. I can’t even come up with good metaphors or puns or similies or anything.

San Quentin’s Raw Sewage Leaks Into SF Bay

SAN QUENTIN (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ? Authorities in Marin County tested the waters in San Francisco Bay Thursday after an estimated 1,500 gallons of raw sewage escaped from the state prison at San Quentin.

It was the third time in less than a month that sewage has spilled into the bay from a facility located in Marin County.

1,500 gallons. That’s practically nothing, compared to the 5 million gallons into Richardson Bay just recently. Although, knowing a few San Quentin guards (one of them plays hockey on Jason’s team), the image of them with sandbags against the tide makes me both cringe and, OK, admit it, laugh a little.

The Environmental Studies grad student in me wants to start a tirade about what we’re doing and what it means and all the different micro ecosystems we’re destroying while still clamoring for crab for dinner. The confirmed cynic in me realizes that as with anything having to do with the water, once it’s out there, we shrug a little, and then get on with our lives, and that the term for this is “peek-a-boo mentality”. Just like with a baby whose sense of object permanence isn’t wholly developed, the second the mess slips below the tide, it’s magically “gone”.

But here’s the thing… it’s really all connected. It’s a well-known epidemiological fact that in areas where you have a lot of human habitation, and therefore these kinds of spills and this kind of runoff, the folks who participate in surfing, windsurfing, kitesurfing, and other forms of water recreation, end up contributing to the hospital economy through outbreaks of meningitis, hepatitis, and unnamed rashes, as a result of their contact with the water. And let’s not even talk about the spike in diseases picked up by the immigrant communities who fish from this bay to feed their families, and show up at local hospitals. Back when I was in grad school, the hospitals drove (and financed) a campaign for polylingual signage at fishing spots around the bay, because they couldn’t afford the waves of (indigent) immigrants showing up having been poisoned in one way or another by eating what they’d caught. Children die if they eat too much of what swims in this bay.

And yet from the surface… it’s lovely. The sunset on Thursday was a gorgeous pinky-purple… caused by atmospheric pollution which also made the stars and the city lights twinkle marvelously.

Related posts:

1. Too little, too late; Marin fined $1.6 million
2. Don’t Swim in the Poo, Continued
3. Don’t Swim In The Poo

Tags: Environment, Holding Forth, San Francisco Bay

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