A Dirty Little Secret Leaked in San Diego

George Bush was in town Friday, but the man who campaigned as Your Environmental President neglected to even mention it. Gov. Wilson was here, too, promising millions to fix it--and fending off criticism that, as San Diego’s mayor, he’d blown the best chance to prevent it. Tourists caught wind of it, and the cancellations poured in. America’s Cup racers pinched their noses and gamely sailed on by it.

It could be seen Friday afternoon from Point Loma, near the mouth of glittering San Diego Bay. “See there, that dark spot where the birds are all feeding?” Claude Janowicz said, pointing. “That’s it. They call it a sewage boil.” Janowicz works at the city’s Point Loma waste-water plant, where sewage is cleansed, a bit, before being piped out to sea.

About 10 days ago, in shallow water and close to shore, the pipe broke. Effluent has bubbled steadily to the surface ever since, 180 million gallons a day, carrying disease and stench, and forcing closure of the city’s fine beaches. The timing was rotten. With the America’s Cup, the presidential visit and all, this should have been a shining moment for San Diego. Instead, attention has been diverted to the city’s complicity in one of California’s dirty little secrets--our common use of the blue Pacific as a toilet.

Modern plumbing is a marvelous thing. Flick the handle and whatever the bowl contains is flushed away, disappeared, no more. Or so it seems on the user end. Janowicz and his colleagues are on the collector end, and they know better.

“This is where you get your hundred dollar bills,” he said, “your drug needles, tampon holders, fish, rats, those balloons that drug smugglers use--anything people flush down the toilet ends up here.”

He was standing in Building 1387, where a conveyor device separates bulkier, non-biodegradable materials known as “rags” from the sewage. Though 30 years old, the coastal plant still has a makeshift feel to it, with administrators camped in portable trailers and equipment held together with jerry-rigged devices. It’s not all spit and baling wire, but it’s not NASA either. The smell is what you would expect.

“Actually,” Janowicz told a complaining visitor, “this is a pretty good day.”

Euphemisms abound among the workers. In addition to rags, they talk of filtering out “grits” and “floatables.” They tend to wear tennis shoes, for traction: This is not a place to slip and fall. They take pride in their sewer expertise, in their enhanced training program and the higher pay it has allowed. They also tell a lot of Ed Norton jokes, and understand their societal role as caretakers of a municipal necessity most people, mayors included, would rather forget.

“This is a real degrading job,” one of the operators said. “In the old days, before they required us to be certified, this was one of the lowest-paying jobs in city service. If you complained about your supervisor or got in trouble, they would transfer you out to Point Loma, and that was the end of the Earth.”

On most days, it still is--out of sight, out of mind.

Dilution, the old line went, is the solution to pollution--and in the 1960s and ‘70s the major California coastal cities embraced it. The churning ocean, scientists insisted, provided a perfect receptacle for sewage. As this ran contrary to the federal government’s insistence that so-called secondary treatment plants were needed, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego all became entangled in legal battles. In the process, they have missed out on federal funds and the price tag for conversion to modern sewage methods has blown through the roof.

This reliance on the ocean seems crazy in a couple of ways. First, science is the process of discovering that what previous generations declared was safe actually can kill you. Most experts believe today that dispersing sewage into the Pacific is harmless, but what will they say tomorrow? Also, there’s a question of conservation. California works its water to death, harnessing every drop for electricity, irrigation, urban development. And then, at the final leg of the pipe works, vast amounts that could be recaptured, cleansed and put back to work simply are flushed away with the sewage.

Of course, we contemplate these things only when a pipe breaks, or fish are declared inedible, or a beach is closed. Most of the time, we simply flush and forget. Politicians will find no immediate payoff in fixing sewer systems. Waste-water facilities cost a lot of money, and make for lousy photo-ops. Far better to build a few fire stations or a trolley system, to bring the Olympics to town, or even the America’s Cup--and then pray that the scientists are right, the lawyers prevail and the pipes don’t break.