Feb 27 2009
Don’t Swim In The Poo
Unbefreakinglievable.
Sewage spills foul San Francisco Bay over and over
SAN FRANCISCO—Last weekend, 890,000 gallons of raw sewage and stormwater spilled into San Francisco Bay from an overloaded World War II-era treatment plant. Five days earlier, a ruptured pipe released 400,000 gallons of filth into the bay.
And those were just the big spills the public heard about.
On average, human waste spills into the San Francisco Bay more than five times a day, fouling the waters and shorelines of this environmental jewel and recreational treasure.
Decrepit pipes, outdated municipal sewage treatment systems and poor upkeep have been blamed for many of the spills into one the world’s most famous and beautiful natural harbors. And some of the Bay Area’s wealthiest communities have been identified as some of the most persistent polluters.
“It’s like living in a situation sort of like a Third World country, where there’s poor sanitary management,” said Sejal Choksi of the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper.
I imagine my readers are as sick of reading about this kind of thing as I am sick of blogging about it. If you do a search on “gallons San Francisco Bay” you end up with link after link after link on sewage spills, always more than six figures worth of heinousness. Because I guess it’s just not newsworthy to report five digits or less?
So here’s my question. What do we do about it? The answer, at least in the short term, is, nothing. The municipalities that are doing the dumping always blame lack of funding for new infrastructure, and you just have to know that with things going the way they are, that upgrading sewage piping sure isn’t going to be on the priority list any time soon.
Y’know. Until folks are so poor they have to depend on the fish they catch from this Bay. But by then, it’ll be far too late.
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Yeah, I’m sick of reading about it – but not in the “if you keep telling us I’ll get bored of reading your blog” way – only the “sick in my stomach that it keeps happening, in not insignificant quantities” way. Oh, and yeah, I don’t have to live in it!!! So I claim no right whatsoever to even *suggest* that I’m as sick of reading about it as you are of blogging it!
Average of 5+ times daily??? You may be right about the newsworthy thing.