Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 30, 2008
4. Water Quality –
The Delta's strangest yard sale
The
Dan Haifley, Our Ocean Back Yard: Ocean currents carry our waste -- and hope
San Jose
San Jose
San Jose
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The Delta's strangest yard sale
The
By Michael Fitzgerald
Herman Miller, the storied old man who lived on his floating laboratory, teaching bacteria to eat toxic sludge until famously evicted by the feds, called Friday.
Though this paper gives Miller an ink truck of coverage, we'd never met. Nevertheless, the peppery old river rat asked me to publicize his yard sale.
"You can't believe it," Miller said of his items. "Everything I've collected over 40 years. Very large boat hardware. Stuff nobody wants but me."
Miller directed me to the site of an old creosote plant on the south bank of the Deep Water Channel, a place of Dickensian industrial grit.
Near that spot a year ago, Miller tied up his barge, the Merit, grew anaerobic bacteria in vacuum tanks and encouraged the little beasties to eat pollution, his scheme to get rich.
I found him in a weedy waterfront field. He is 83, spry, diminutive, white-bearded. He was also begrimed after hauling all his stuff out of storage and arraying it in the field.
"I was just counting anchors," Miller greeted me. "I think I have six anchors. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha."
Also lots of laboratory equipment. "Everybody thinks I'm an old bastard who lives on the river," Miller said. "I'm a UOP graduate, an engineer and a scientist."
It was a lousy day, hot, muggy, the air filled with infernal smoke from distant fires. A perfect day to visit a Superfund site.
That's what the feds declared the creosote-soaked property; why they evicted Miller, after a long-drawn-out battle; why he's selling off his cumulus.
"They told me, well, move your stuff," Miller recounted, leading me around. "So I'm trying to sell anything for anything I can get for it."
Of Miller's belongings, half have an Ace Hardware usefulness, and half are too obscure to fly off the shelves - unless there's a mad scientist convention in town.
Miller toured me past heavy-duty hydraulic cylinders; spools of cable; a machine that makes springs; pumps, engines, compressors, tools, chains, ropes, nuts, ballast, bolts, drills; a windlass; a machine that extrudes buoyant foam; and a trailer in which he lived and which has Grey Poupon in the refrigerator.
And, as the saying goes, more! Like a vacuum tank for his anaerobic pets. "It takes a special guy for these toys," Miller said. "One in a million."
Miller claims to have perfected his pollution-eating bugs - a process he calls Vacuum Retort Anaerobic Digestion, or VRAD - and boasts it is starting to take off in
"I'm getting a little too old to form a company. But these young guys will take it and run with it."
Meanwhile, the detested feds commandeered his barge, blundered up the channel and tied it up so ineptly it was damaged, Miller vented.
"They don't know these bolts from six bits," Miller snorted. "Pardon my language."
Several blue-collar men milled about Miller's odd yard sale. Occasionally, one bought something. Just as often, men stared at the items with perplexed looks.
"A lot of it is very, very specialized stuff," said shopper Gregg Culhane. "Very specialized stuff."
"I can't even give it away," Miller sighed. "They don't even know what it is."
Still fighting Uncle Sam, Miller turned down a $350,000 resettlement offer, preferring to live in a veterans home in Yountville until his ship, or barge, comes in.
He wants to be relocated to waterfront property, preferably loaded with pollution for his bacteria.
"Sure. I lived on the water for 40 years," said the only man holding a yard sale on a Superfund site this weekend, anyway. "Where do they think I want to live?
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080629/A_NEWS0803/806290318/-1/A_NEWS07
Dan Haifley, Our Ocean Back Yard: Ocean currents carry our waste -- and hope
San Jose
By Dan Haifley, executive director of O'Neill Sea Odyssey
Ocean currents carry many things, including those which we choose to toss away.
One result is a vast expanse of garbage, caught in gentle waters inside the rotations of ocean currents west of our shores.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in the North Pacific Gyre, one of several zones worldwide surrounded by swirling waters driven by weather and the earth's rotation. Between North America and
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has two parts. The eastern one is north of
There may be 100 million tons of materials in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to Algalita Marine Research Foundation founder Capt. Charles Moore.
Sailing home to
"I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic," he says.
Foundation scientists have studied the phenomenon for more than 10 years; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently honored them for their work.
Today's plastics consist of polymers that do not naturally degrade into the environment. Sunlight can "photodegrade" plastics into smaller pieces called mermaid tears or nurdles, but they remain plastics. The Algalita Foundation Web site acknowledges the key role plastics play in our lives but detail its effect on marine life.
"Fish and ... seabirds mistake plastics for food. Plastic debris release chemical additives and plasticizers into the ocean. Plastic also adsorbs hydrophobic pollutants, like PCBs [and] DDT," it states. "These pollutants bioaccumulate and biomagnify up the food chain, and find their way into the foods we eat."
Plankton -- both phytoplankton and animal zooplankton -- are the foundation of ocean biology. Although the North Pacific Gyre has fewer animals and fish than other areas, it does have a healthy plankton population. But in 2001, samples taken there indicate the plastic's weight exceeded that of zooplankton near the water's surface by six-to-one. The good news is that we can take reduce our use of plastic, to recycle, and to prevent debris from flowing seaward.
You can make a patriotic difference this week. You can reduce the flow of garbage to the ocean by helping with pollution prevention and cleanup efforts on July 4 and 5. Schedule your involvement at www.cleanbeachescoalition.org. You can also learn more about the work of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation at www.algalita.org.##
http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_9735081?nclick_check=1
San Jose
San Jose
By John Woolfolk
Three years after a giant boring machine got stuck under the
On top of that, it now seems the work may not even have been necessary.
But even though more than $7.2 million already has been sunk into a job that was supposed to cost less than $7 million, city officials are vowing to start the project all over again - assuming they can persuade the state to keep paying for it.
The multimillion-dollar mess began with the 1998 upgrade of Highway 87 to a six-lane freeway from
Caltrans agreed to fund the project. But three days after tunneling began in November 2005, river water flooded the digging equipment, trapping the 11-ton automated boring machine in the muck under the east bank - and triggering a blizzard of lawsuits.
Subcontractor Nada Pacific, owner of the $737,000 machine, sued general contractor McGuire and Hester and the city. McGuire and Hester also sued the city.
The contractors, who were seeking more than $6 million in damages, claimed the city contract misrepresented soil and groundwater conditions they encountered. The city asserted the contractors should have expected to hit groundwater under a river and planned accordingly.
But the city council unanimously approved a settlement to end the legal dispute in January, a few months after the contractors extracted the boring equipment by diverting the river around the site and digging down to reach the machine.
City Attorney Rick Doyle explained that
"If you put out bid documents with certain assumptions, they're your documents and you have to assume some responsibility," Doyle said.
The settlement calls for the city to pay $1.1 million to Nada Pacific and $1.9 million to McGuire and Hester. The city also will share damages McGuire and Hester may recover in its suit against the project design firm, RMC Water and Environment.
Meanwhile, it turns out the initial structural fears about the existing sewer line that prompted the replacement project haven't panned out. Timm Borden, the city's deputy director of public works, said the existing line "is actually operating very well - it's holding up fine."
But city officials say the new pipes would give them the added comfort of backup capacity. The biggest question now is how to pay for them.
Moving forward requires convincing Caltrans to cover the additional costs - including the settlement. Borden acknowledged that may be a tough sell, especially as the state confronts a $15 billion budget deficit.
"It's our belief that it's part of the project, and our conclusion is that through no fault of ours, this extra money needed to be spent," Borden said.
Indeed, Caltrans, which already has reimbursed the city for $2.76 million of the project's cost, doesn't seem keen on absorbing the settlement.
"We're not part of the litigation - that's between the city and the contractor," said spokeswoman Lauren Wonder. "They're going to have to account for what they've spent, and then they can send us a new proposal if they want to move forward."
Borden said after investing so much, the city isn't going to give up on the project.
"It is kind of a challenge now," he said, "to make sure we have something to deliver at the end of the day."#
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_9741891
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