Prim Canadian City to Stop Dumping Poop into the Sea

The city of Victoria, British Columbia has been dumping raw sewage into the Puget Sound for years, much to the consternation of anti-poop-dumping activists who waged a campaign starring ‘Mr. Floatie’, a mascot who looks suspiciously like a relative of Mr. Hankey.

Well, Mr. Floatie’s hard work is finally being rewarded, as the city decided to stop pouring millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and the North Olympic Peninsula.

Officials in British Columbia have approved a plan that will build four treatment plants to handle the raw sewage.

From the Peninsula Daily News:

For years, the effluent issue has been a sore point on both sides of the border.

It contrasts with Victoria’s position as the capital of British Columbia and its self-promotion as a tourist center, a gateway to the wilderness forests and rugged marine coast of Vancouver Island, and a city of prim and proper homes, shops, gardens and tea rooms worthy of its royal namesake.

“It’s the only city in Canada where people resolutely cling to the notion that Victorian waste is different from other waste,” said Lara Tessaro, a staff attorney with Ecojustice in Canada.

Efforts to shame politicians into adopting sewage treatment were marked by a humorous yet failed attempt by Mr. Floatie — the 7-foot-tall brown-clad mascot for POOP, People Opposed to Outfall Pollution — to run for mayor of Victoria.

You gotta love how the group found a way to call themselves POOP.

Link [Peninsula Daily News]

Pipe Break Leads to 500,000 Gallon Sewage Spill in San Francisco Bay

San Francisco is totally full of shit. At least, the bay is – now that half a million gallons of sewage have escaped from a Sausalito sanitary plant. A broken pipe caused the partially treated sewage to gush into the water, and officials have been scrambling to contain it. The spill was first spotted around 1pm on Tuesday at the Sausalito-Marin district’s treatment plant in the Golden Gate national recreation area.

From The Guardian:

Bob Simmons, general manager of the Sausalito-Marin city sanitary district, said shortly after 2pm that the spill was 99% contained.

Workers in wetsuits were trying to seal up a metal ‘’saddle” placed around the 24-inch-wide pressure pipeline resting along the shore below the Fort Baker treatment plant to redirect wastewater back into the plant.

After several hours of unsuccessful attempts to plug the 2-inch hole before the pipe was submerged in tide water, the leak was allowed to continue until work could continue on Wednesday morning.

”This situation is unfortunate,” said Simmons, noting the district’s largest previous spill was 63,000 gallons in January 2008.

The Sausalito-Marin district was one of nine southern Marin sewage agencies ordered to submit improvement plans to the EPA last year after the agency ordered them to fix chronic problems like spills, sewer maintenance and a network of aging pipes. This spill was likely caused by corrosion of a 23-year-old pipe constantly exposed to tide water.

Anyone for a swim? Don’t worry, the water always smells like that.

Link [The Guardian]
Photo credit: LA Times

Orange County, California’s Sewage to Drinking Water Treatment Plant Finished

Here in America, we have a water problem – and I’m not just talking about shortages. We waste incredible, mind-boggling amounts of it. There are so many things we can do to use water more wisely, and in parched Santa Ana, California, officials are getting creative in a way that has some residents angry and disgusted. They’re recycling toilet water. Like it or not, people might as well get used to ideas like these – it’s wasting so much water that’s really disgusting.

From The New York Times:

When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Recycling sewage into potable water was a no-brainer for Orange County; an ever-rising population meant that a new $200M sewage pipeline would have needed to be built, and they over-pumped their groundwater basin to the point of drawing seawater into their water supply. So, the sewage to water plan works out for a lot of reasons. It sounds gross at first, but the process used to clean the water really is incredibly thorough.

If you think about it, though, why are we flushing so much fresh, clean, potable water in the first place? Greywater systems that at least divert used water from the bathroom sink and/or shower could be used to flush toilets instead. It seems absurd to foul perfectly good drinking water in such a way. The way we use water is so messed up and backwards. Hopefully we’ll do a lot of catching up in the coming decades as people realize how precious a resource it really is.

To read about the full treatment process that transforms the sewage into drinkable water, read the full piece in The New York Times.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Flickr user Oracio Alvarado

Yum, Sewage: LA Aims to Add Wastewater to Drinking Water Supply

Los Angeles is one of many cities facing water shortages, and it’s bound to only get worse over the next decade as the city’s population grows ever larger. Enter Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa’s solution: recycling ‘heavily cleansed’ sewage water into drinking water.

From The New York Times:

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who opposed such a plan a decade ago over safety concerns, announced the proposal on Thursday as part of a package of initiatives to put the city, the nation’s second largest, on a stricter water budget. The other plans include increasing fines for watering lawns during restricted times, tapping into and cleaning more groundwater, and encouraging businesses and residents to use more efficient sprinklers and plumbing fixtures.

The move comes as California braces for the possibility of the most severe water shortages in decades.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada, which supplies about a third of Los Angeles’s water, is short of expectations. At the same time, the Western drought has lowered supplies in reservoirs, while legal rulings to protect endangered species will curtail water deliveries from Northern California.

Before you wrinkle your nose and decide it’s absolutely disgusting, consider this: not only will the water be purer than tap water, it won’t be introduced directly to taps: it would be injected into the ground and gradually filter down to aquifers, making it much cleaner. The only problem is that the chemicals that are set to be used to cleanse the water haven’t been independently tested for safety, so hopefully that will happen before action is actually taken on the plan.

Props to LA for dealing with the problem now instead of waiting until they’re in the midst of a severe crisis, like our federal government likes to do.

Link [New York Times]
Photo credit: Flickr user Elsie esq.

San Franciscans Hope to Name Sewage Plant after George W. Bush

What better memorial to commemorate George W. Bush’s presidency than a sewage treatment plant? That’s what a group of people in San Francisco hope to accomplish after organizing a petition to rename the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility.

From SFist:

The local grassroots movement, helmed by “Wayne Pickering,” is proposing an ordinance initiative for the November 2008 San Francisco ballot in order to get the poop/pee/vomit plant’s title changed. Why? To honor our current leader of the free world with an “appropriate and enduring legacy, for no other president in modern American history has accomplished so much in such a short time.

They held a signature drive last Friday, and we can only hope that they got enough to make this happen. While we may not ever be able to repair the damage Bush has done on this country, and will be left with the scars of his presidency for decades into the future, the least the American people deserve is a cesspool of shit officially named after him. They say that laughter is the best medicine, and as sick as we all are of the assclown that’s currently the head of our country, we need some healing. It would go great with George W. Bush toilet paper…

Link [SFist]

Photo credit: Prank Place

An Insult to Sewage Plants Everywhere: Renaming the San Fran Zoo Sewage Plant after George Bush

How fitting, someone is trying to rename a sewage plant in San Francisco after President George Bush.

SFist has it:

Looking to honor the forty-third President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, the recently formed Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is looking to change the name of the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility. It seems the group would like to rename the SF Zoo adjacent facility to the “George W Bush Sewage Plant.”

Links [SFist] & [Presidential Memorial Commission]