Infeasible Is Not A Dirty Word

Much ado has been made in the blogoshpere and public meetings of late over "dewatering." For those who have not chosen to fully live every phase of the sewer project, or prefer to leave water matters in the hands of the professionals, this water is that which is being pumped out of the trenches where the contractors are putting in the sewer pipe in the low lying areas. It is important to know that 1) You cannot lay and seal the pipe in water; 2) Anywhere from 300,000 gallons to 1 million gallons of water is going into the bay DAILY as a matter of natural course.

The County and contractors have been under fire by certain long-standing sewer critics for not using all of that water for recharge (at Tri-W, or rather the Mid-Town site, gets as much as it can percolate), or for dust control on the roads. And at Broderson. Some of that water has been pumped into the bay as there has been no other feasible place to put it, meaning trucking it "somewhere" or running pipe and pumps to some of the town's drainage basins would have had huge logistical and cost impacts.

The most definitive answer regarding Broderson, the place the sewer critics are pushing to put it lately, came from the County yesterday in the form of a letter from Dave Flynn, Deputy Director of Public Works to Kenneth A. Harris, Executive Director of the Central Coast Regional Water Control Board. Broderson is not feasible. Read the attached letter to see why.

The point is, the low lying areas needed to be dug up when there is no rain. Broderson has been a very lengthy process with all of the environmental work that was necessary and the project could not wait around for it to be finished.

To habitually scream 8 to 16 million gallons of water going into the bay!, with NO ACTUAL figures is just plain wrong, not to mention the irresponsibility of churning up panic or anger in the general populace by false statements. We now know that since July, there has been on average 750,000 gallons of dewatering a day. The average land disposal per day has been 550,000 gallons per day; of that, 400,000 gallons per day to Tri-W and 150,000 gallons per day used for construction purposes. So an average of 200,000 gallons of water is going into the bay (keep in mind 300,000 gallons goes in there NATURALLY).

So what is all this about? Critics latching onto a plausible-sounding argument with which to bash the County. Frankly, that just sucks and I am pretty sick of it.

I can only hope that County will consider the source of this dissension; it is tiny, long-standing in hating-every-aspect-of-this-or-any-other-doable-sewer-project, and while annoying, very annoying, it is only a small part of the populace who is otherwise getting along good-naturedly with the bumps and beauties of the project.