Our Sewage Stats!

These words below in blue are part of the Basin Management Committee report for Wednesday, August 21, 2016 (meeting to be held at 1:30 p.m. at the South Bay Community Center). Nice to see how our "products" are being put back into circulation, albeit via a circuitous and time-distant route. Think of all of the water that could have been saved if we were flushing and forgetting back in 2008! Oh well, better now than never, right?

Los Osos Wastewater Project Flow and Connection Update 

Staff plans to provide periodic updates on the status of connections and flows from the LOWWP. The following is an update on the status:

1,900 connections have been made, including neighborhood systems and mobile home parks. There are approximately 2,300 homes and businesses connected. 

Flows are approximately 200,000 gallons per day on the weekends, slightly less on weekdays. 

Effluent has been discharged to the Broderson percolation site since August 10th. It is filtered and disinfected, which meets the WDR requirements of 7mg/L total nitrogen. The County is now going through the process verification procedure with SWB Division of Drinking Water so that the effluent can be deemed Title 22 disinfected tertiary recycled water. In the last two weeks, a maximum flow of 400,000 gpd has been sent to Broderson as water is discharged from accumulated storage. 

Since the water is of sparkly-clean, Title 22 quality, I decided to color the text blue, not yellow!

You may access the full Basin Management Committee report from this link:
http://slocountywater.org/site/Water%20Resources/LosOsos/pdf/2016-09-21%20Los%20Osos%20BMC%20Agenda%20Package.pdf

On this link you will also find a tech memorandum outlining funding and financing programs available to us to do the other half of this water equation—namely, saving our used and abused drinking water supply. Somehow I hear a distant echo of the words emblazoned on signs back in 2005, "We Delay, We Pay!" And that is what we are doing now and about to do more of, the pay part I mean.

Something's Fishy with Salmon

Tom Salmon had a Letter to the Editor published in the Tribune the other day. He is thumping on the LOCSD for issuing the water conservation measures (that were recently posted on their website and voted on at their August 7 meeting). Read their news release on their website.

"Too little to late" he accuses, then proceeds to slam them for not demanding that they sternly tell the County that they can't put the water he speaks of in the bay.

Read Salmon's letter here:
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2014/08/18/3200944/too-little-too-late.html?sp=/99/181/182/

Salmon speaks of "treatable water." Treatable by who? Stored and put where? Could that have been done? Sure, but at what cost to the sewer project, and more to the point, what delays? Yes, delays, while the project ground to a halt to sort out where to put that water.

Actually, the LOCSD had very little that it could say about that water that he refers to—water sucked out of the ground from the sewer project trenching. Most of it was used at Tri-W—oops, the Mid-Town site—and for the water trucks to spray for dust suppression, and yes, some of it went into the bay! The LOCSD had even less ability as to what it could do with the water.

Offer it to the the avocado farmers in Morro Bay! Put it in at Broderson! Clean up the water and....well, I'm not sure what came after that. It not like there were a bunch of tanks to store it in. Or that people that could be lined up with buckets. Who would pay for the clean-up? The sewer project? The LOCSD?

He thinks that because the LOCSD is part of the groundwater basin adjudication, that they could somehow mount a lawsuit from inside of that—on the almost completed ruling (this thing has been going on for YEARS). How shortsighted that would be? Put years of work to actually manage the basin in jeopardy. The LOCSD is not the only entity in that lawsuit either - the County is a player, Golden State Water and S & T Mutual Water are in this as well.

He seems to be unaware that the District is emerging from bankruptcy. Money is tight and ANY monies not pledged elsewhere must go to water conservation where is is not happening fully yet, at the household level.

Three hundred thousand to one million gallons of water flows into the bay naturally, DAILY, from springs, seeps and an upper aquifer overfilled form septic tank outflow.

Naturally, the Water Board was bombarded with the sewer detractor's angst and asked the County what was gong on?

Here in .jpg form is the County's response (click on the image to see a larger size). Read where the water went and why:

You can also read my response letter in the Tribune to Salmon's unfair accusations:

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2014/08/19/3202157/litigation-expensive.html?sp=/99/181/182/

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.

Broderson—Explained

Dig Los Osos has a new post on the Broderson leach field and what is being done there to reuse the water returned from the treatment plant. Read about it at this link:

http://www.diglososos.com/2013/07/19/broderson-leach-field/

Broderson Leach Field Demystified!

Dig Los Osos has a new post on what is happening at Broderson. It is a great place to hike and looks like it will continue to be be so, just a couple of trail re-routes! The article also gives a schedule for work.

The link to the article is here and the link to their map is here, in case you want to go straight to the map first. It takes a moment or two to load the map and scroll down to see the plant list! Especially edifying is the huge removal of the dreaded and icky Veldt grass (Ehrharta calycina). You can read more about that ghastly grass here:

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=21574