Regulators order East Bay sewer pipes be replaced
Kelly Zito
San Francisco Chronicle
03/16/2011
Federal regulators have ordered six East Bay cities and one sanitary district to replace aging, cracked pipes responsible for flushing 125 million gallons of raw and partially treated sewage into San Francisco Bay this winter.
The improvements, mandated in a legal settlement sparked by multiple violations of the federal Clean Water Act in recent years, could run as high as $45 million a year, translating in to steep sewer rate increases for the 650,000 customers served by the seven agencies.
The cities of Oakland, Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley, Alameda, Albany and the Stege Sanitary District agreed to dig up and swap out hundreds of miles of rotting pipes - including some clay pipes around 100 years old - in order to stem the flood of storm water that overwhelms wastewater treatment plants on rainy days.
The agreement reached Tuesday with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Justice Department, California Water Boards and San Francisco Baykeeper is part of a broad effort to decrease the discharges of effluent into the bay, where it poses risks to human and wildlife health.
"In most of the country, this problem has been solved, but in the Bay Area there is still a tremendous amount of sewage overflows into the bay," said Jared Blumenfeld, regional administrator of the EPA. "Our goal is to have zero overflows."
Blumenfeld calculates that the seven sewage agencies have spent about $335 million on system upgrades in the last 25 years. But the measures have fallen short - hence the staggering 125 million gallons of sewage spilled into the bay since October.
Under the order, the satellite communities must identify the leakiest and highest-volume pipes in their systems and begin work on replacing them with plastic, or PVC pipes, which are more resistant to cracks and seismic activity.
For the Stege Sanitary District, which serves 40,000 customers in Kensington, El Cerrito and parts of Richmond, the improvements will cost about $1.5 million annually for the next two decades, or about $30 million. In anticipation of the settlement, the district board voted last summer to raise rates by about 60 percent over the next three years, according to district manager Douglas Humphrey.
