Ohio Town Resists Sewer Hook-Up Since 1979

There are some eerie similarities between the Los Osos sewer mess and that of a tiny town of 622 souls called Bay View in Erie County, Ohio. Of course their tiny soon-to-be system costs only a bit over $6 million as there is already an existing treatment plant awaiting delivery of product. But work on the pipes began in 1979 and is just now on the brink of being started. Read about it here:
http://www.sanduskyregister.com/news/environment/9429986

A 2013 report said: "The Ohio section of the report lists the Bay View West beach in Erie County as the fourth-worst in the state."

(Erie County health commissioner Pete) Schade's letter to (Governor John) Kasich outlines the problem.

" 'Over the past several years, I have been working to bring sanitary sewers to a small village of 400 homes on the Sandusky Bay. The Village of Bay View, Ohio, has septic systems that basically dump raw sewage directly into Sandusky Bay,' Schade wrote."

Comments below this article were:

doratheexplorer

SAT, 06/29/2013 - 3:19PM

Gross

Blues

SAT, 06/29/2013 - 4:05PM

There is a beach in Bay View? 

doratheexplorer

SAT, 06/29/2013 - 9:48PM

A crappy beach

Tool Box

MON, 07/01/2013 - 11:47AM

So the poop from my house is going into the bay? Oh my, that's not good! All those people who swim at the sand bar are swimming in my poop then! Ewe!

I can't say that I ever see swimmers in OUR bay, do you? But then, having waded into Lake Erie at (a different spot!) this summer, the water there was a LOT warmer than here. It is nice to know though, that we are not alone in the world of sewer reluctance......although I believe we can rightly claim a far more spectacular reluctance on oh, so many levels.

Sewer Tour Coming Up!!

Announced by Supervisor Bruce Gibson at the Thursday night LOCAC meeting - a new sewer tour of the treatment plant behind the cemetery on Los Osos Valley Road has been scheduled for Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 5:00 p.m.! It will last from between one to one and one-half hours. 

We usually have to E-mail someone from the County to put our names on the list and that announcement as to who that might be, is not up on the County website just yet. I will post the link when it becomes available. Hope to see you there - the last tour in March was quite fascinating!

Food (And Water) For Thought on Diablo

Cape Cod, another oceanside community built on sand, has had some rather bad news from the Silent Spring Institute about its water supply. The institute found a high level of antibiotics and PFOS, a chemical used in stain-resistant and non-stick coatings, and fire-fighting foams.

"Although Cape Cod is particularly vulnerable to contamination due to the prevalence of septic systems and its shallow sandy aquifer, the study has national implications. A quarter of U.S. households use septic systems or small community systems to process wastewater, and about 40% of Americans rely on groundwater for drinking supplies."*

Uhhhhh, that would be us!! 

There are currently no regulations in the U.S. on the contaminants listed above (and so many others) as there is in Europe. The solution put forward to the problem in Cape Cod was to "(divert) treated water from septic systems and centralized plants away from drinking water supplies." Of course, we are doing just the opposite.

Today at the BOS, the first feelers were put forward on using the desalinated water from the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, piping it both to South County and Los Osos. All five supervisors voted yes, let's pursue this. 

Water fresh out of the ocean has a monumentally higher dilution rate from contaminants than does our confined aquifers into which we are returning our recycled sewer water.** 

The usual naysayers were there at the podium for Public Comment on the issue, railing against even exploring the idea of importing Diablo's desal water to Los Osos. But then, they were key in stoping a sewer project, losing a $134 million low interest loan, delaying water conservation, and making the County come up with a second sewer idea for Los Osos at $29 million MORE than the LOCSD's project that they trashed. 

How long will our drought be? What contaminants are in our drinking water? At what concentration are they? At what rate are they increasing? These are all important questions. 

What solutions do the sewer nuts propose this time? Actually, all I have heard is a mumbled mouthing from the heads planted deep in our fine Baywood sands. It sounds like they think that we can live completely on the water from the aquifers directly beneath us—yet, yet, they complain that the Basin Plan—the plan that will manage this water supply of ours—does NOT take into account any plans for a prolonged drought!

So....who do you want to listen to this time around Los Osians? The sewer nuts of old, or more reasonable minds that know that one El Nino, should it be a water-plentiful one next year, will NOT fix our problem; that no amount of conservation will save us; that there is no possible way to know the timeline on the next drought or even how long the current one will last; that there is no way to predict exactly what global warming will do to both us and the animals and plants in the environment in which we all live. Do we want to be prepared or simply avoid thinking about it until we can't live here at all anymore?


Please read the report generated in 2006 by the LOCSD about the constituents already in our water, some of which are not regulated.
http://www.losososcsd.org/Library/Document%20Library/UPPER%20AQUIFER%20CHARACTERIZATION.pdf

* Please read this source article:
http://www.wateronline.com/doc/contaminants-cods-drinking-water-silent-spring-institute-finds-0001

** "The Institute found that treated water from both septic systems and sewage treatment plants contain similar levels of contaminants. The systems effectively remove some chemicals, such as caffeine and acetaminophen (Tylenol); others pass through largely unchanged, including sulfamethoxazole and TCEP, a chlorinated flame retardant."

Michigan's Septic Tank Slip-Up

We are not Michigan here in Los Osos of course, but septic tanks around a body of water bode badly for them too a new study finds.

Check this out:
http://www.wateronline.com/doc/septic-tanks-aren-tkeeping-poo-rivers-lakes-0001?sectionCode=TOC&templateCode=Single&user=2124006&source=nl:43697&utm_source=et_10759433&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WOL_2015-08-25&utm_term=8B6151B5-326C-4D25-A47F-7FA24BE85D17&utm_content=Do%2bSeptic%2bTanks%2bPollute%2bFreshwater%253f

A Look Back In History, 2012

A petition geared to stop the County's sewer (the present one anyway) remains online years later. Take a look back in history from January 2012:

https://www.change.org/p/tell-decision-makers-stop-the-most-expensive-per-capita-sewer-in-the-us-the-los-osos-sewer

It needed 5,000 signatures and garnered only 299. A sad commentary for diehard sewer opposers always looking for that "better" sewer design; a glad commentary on reality and the cleaning up of our water and moving ahead.

Bay News LO Sewer Article

Hot off the press, or in this case, arriving in warmish pixels, the Bay News has a Los Osos sewer story this issue - basically writing about what went on at the Board of Supes yesterday, protested heartily by the usual suspects. Alas, not even a tiny pause in approving the sewer's Consent Calendar items by ALL FIVE SUPES, (Yayyyy, Supes!!) which must have been truly disheartening for the you-know-whos.

Here is the link:
http://tolosapressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/BN-08-20-15-web.pdf

You can find the cost breakdowns off this link:
http://tolosapressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/LO-WWTP-costs.pdf

And here is the link to the latest County Sewer Report:
http://www.slocounty.ca.gov/Assets/PW/LOWWP/PM+Monthly+Update+Jun2015.pdf

Check out the fun photos! Our sewer is moving closer to completion, the naysayers are more and more irrelevant than ever!!

BOS - 8-18-2015 Triple Serving Sewer Stuff!

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Consent Agenda - Public Works Items: 

15. Submittal of a resolution authorizing execution of notice of completion and acceptance for the Collection System Pump Stations Contract for the Los Osos Wastewater Project, Los Osos. District 2. 
    

17. Request to approve Amendment No. 4 to the Owner-Engineer Agreement with Carollo Engineers for professional engineering services during construction of the Los Osos Water Recycling Facility, in the amount of $329,303. District 2. 
    

CONFERENCE WITH LEGAL COUNSEL - PENDING LITIGATION (Government Code section 54956.9.) It is the intention of the Board to meet in closed session concerning the following items: Existing Litigation (Gov. Code, section 54956.9(a)). (Formally initiated.) (3) ARB, Inc. v. County of San Luis Obispo; .............

When relevant documents are posted, I will add the links here.

Two steps closer to flushing, where the goods will take a little journey out of town and return—TRANSFORMED!....... And on the ARB issue—who knows where that will go!

Update—here are the LINKS:
For Item 15 - http://agenda.slocounty.ca.gov/agenda/sanluisobispo/Proposal.html?select=4996
For Item 17 - http://agenda.slocounty.ca.gov/agenda/sanluisobispo/Proposal.html?select=4976

Dirty Jobs Found On YouTube!

Septic tank clean-out and inspection! Just the right follow-up to yesterdays post! Just think, sometime in 2016 Al's Septic will be working 24/7! Yeeee-haaaaaa!!!!

Septic Tank Quad System

From the 'burbs of Cleveland, July 2015: 

This is what a septic system looks like on a two acre parcel. I will protect the owner of the property by calling him Mr. X. He very generously gave me a septic tank tour and it was quite different from anything that I had seen before. I suspect out in the 'burbs, on a large chunk of land, you will find different systems from what we, in tiny-lotville, could possibly have. (You may click on any of these images to enlarge them.)

Pictured above are three of the four chambers of this system. The contents flow from the first through fourth chambers, the water becoming progressively cleaner as it advances. I am standing on the first, underground tank, to take this photograph. Pictured below is the unseen underground first chamber which receives the output from the house: sinks, tubs/showers, laundry, toilets.

The lid to the second chamber, above and below.

Mr. X kindly lifter the concrete lid to the second, visible chamber. 
No noxious aromas wafted forth.

Pictured below is the concrete lid to the third chamber.

Mr. X lifted the lid to the third chamber. Again, no fumes.

Below is the concrete lid to the fourth and final chamber.

Below, the lid opened, reveals some sort of attached mechanism. I forgot to ask what it was. A pump perhaps? This final phase water drains out into piping in the woods. Whatever nitrates or other components are left are sucked up by the vegetation to which the water flows.

Below, you are looking back at the one invisible and three visible tank lids. The forest is maybe another 20 feet behind me where the water eventually goes.

The forest into which the reclaimed water is received. It was pretty darn green I'll have to say; but then it actually rains in the Cleveland 'burbs—a lot this past year.

For fun and refreshment, please don't take this as a depressing tease to the parched Californians, what you see is the lake in the front yard, stocked with bass of some sort. Just enjoy a sight that we are longing to see. We could move to the Cleveland 'burbs to escape the drought if we really wanted to.....and have a nice two-acre parcel with a small lake and lots of fluffy, green trees, that you actually don't need to water.....

Thanks to Mr. X for the septic system tour!