San Mateo County cities forced to address sewage overflows
Joseph Capote
San Francisco Examiner
03/07/2010
Cities across San Mateo County are suffering from a variety of problems resulting from waste water overflows. The overflows, also known as sanitary sewer overflows or SSO's, have been occurring with alarming regularity within the county. So much so that the independent watchdog group San Francisco Baykeeper has initiated a number of lawsuits against the city governments in order to force infrastructure upgrades.
Sanitary sewer overflows occur when untreated sewage is discharged before it reaches a water quality treatment control facility. The main causes of SSO are heavy rainfall, blockage of sewer lines, pumping station malfunctions and human error.
In February, the city of San Carlos agreed to pay a settlement of $350,000 for overflows of untreated sewage into the San Francisco bay. As part of the lawsuit brought on by the San Francisco Baykeeper, San Carlos also agreed to spend millions upgrading its sewer system.
Similar lawsuits have been filed against the cities of San Bruno and Millbrae. San Bruno, already threatened with a $630,000 fine from the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, is accused of spilling 1.9 million gallons of sewage on 58 separate spills from 2004 to 2009. Millbrae is aggressively protesting the number of violations claimed in its lawsuit, though the city has plans spend $34 million dollars renovating its 50 year old waste water treatment facility.
San Mateo, after receiving a cease-and-desist order last year to control the excess flows in the system during the winter, is slated to install two new pipes this summer in order to control the flow of waste water. San Mateo deputy director Darla Reams said, "We'd been working on a plan for 10 years,..We knew we were having overflows in the winter, which is bad. It just became a high priority".
According to a press release from the San Francisco Baykeeper, the lawsuit...
