Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 4, 2009
4. Water Quality –
Sewer outflow project gets under way
Chico Enterprise-Record
Sewer extension gets ceremonial beginning
Oroville Mercury-Register
Tahoe governing district investigating cause of sewer spill
Tahoe Daily Tribune
Researchers set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Mercury News
Officials at border hail wastewater diversion system
San Diego Union-Tribune
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Sewer outflow project gets under way
Chico Enterprise-Record-8/4/09
By Heather Hacking
A project to move Chico's sewer outflow along the Sacramento River is under way this week, with a construction crew building a cofferdam, which allows workers a place for construction.
The work was needed because the river has shifted in recent years, threatening to cut off the flow of treated water.
Tamara Miller, a project manager with MPM Engineering of Chico, explained the cofferdam temporarily creates a barrier in the water so construction can occur.
In this case, the pipe will be installed and will sink to the bottom of the water.
She said the company building the dam specializes in this type of construction, as will the company installing the pipe.
Among the many safeguards being taken are monitoring for turbidity, and using vegetable oil as lubricant. She said approved methods will also be used if any fish need to be moved from the construction area back into the river.
The new 84-inch pipe, with a diffuser, will be built about 1,200 feet downstream from the two current pipes, which will be capped off, explained Quené Hansen, project manager for the city's Capital Projects Services Department.
The State Land Commission is allowing the former pipes to remain in place, in case river conditions allow them to be used again.
Hansen said the estimate is that the new pipe will serve the city for about 15 years, including future sewage treatment additions, unless the river changes course again.
The new diffuser should allow the city up to a maximum of 15 million gallons a day of treated water, up from 9 million gallons a day.
But maximum flow wouldn't take place for five to seven years when the city upgrades its sewage plant.
The project was necessary because a gravel bar has been building along the river at the mouth of Big Chico Creek, near where M&T Ranch moved its pumps in 1997.
That project was built to protect fish migrating up the creek.
As part of that 1997 project, the ranch also struck a deal to provide water to a nearby wildlife refuge.
The city's current outflow pipes are 300 feet downstream from the M&T pumps. Since the west bank and an accumulation of gravel began on the Butte County side of the waterway.
While the new city outflow will solve the city's problem, the gravel bar is still a threat to the M&T/wildlife refuge pumps. Various options are still being explored.
The current city work in the water will be completed by the end of September, and the total project will be done by the end of January.
The cost of the project is $6 million. Due to good timing, the city was able to take advantage of funds from the State Water Resources Control Board, State Revolving Fund Loan, Hansen said.
Hansen explained this allows the city $2 million in "fund forgiveness," for communities in need, Hansen explained.
"We lucked out that our project was already on the books and we had been working with the Water Quality Board," she said.
As part of the project, the city has an easement from M&T Ranch, and has needed to take out many almond trees to make way for the construction.#
http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_12987391
Sewer extension gets ceremonial beginning
Oroville Mercury-Register-8/3/09
A groundbreaking was held Monday for a project to extend sewer lines across the Thermalito Power Canal under the Table Mountain Boulevard bridge, just north of the county center.
The project will connect 170 acres north of the canal with the city of Oroville's sewer system.
The property is where the nonprofit BayTEC alliance plans to build its Regional Innovation and Technology Center.
The group formed early this year to attract green technology to the Oroville area, focusing on solar, biomass, green construction and water.
The plans envision more than a million square-feet of research and manufacturing businesses on the property, employing thousands of people.
The city contributed $160,000 from its sewer fund for the project, which will be reimbursed as businesses are connected.
The group's name stems from the view of the Forebay from the propoerty to be developed.#
http://www.orovillemr.com/news/ci_12987189
Tahoe governing district investigating cause of sewer spill
Tahoe Daily Tribune-8/4/09
Lake Tahoe's east-shore highway could reopen as early as Tuesday afternoon after a Saturday sewer spill closed the thruway to traffic, a Nevada Department of Transportation spokesman said Monday.
Granite Construction started work Monday morning to fix a section of Nevada Highway 28 about 2 miles east of Sand Harbor that dissolved when a line that carries treated sewer water broke early Saturday morning. NDOT has partnered with the company on an “emergency contract,” said NDOT spokesman Scott Magruder.
“We're very confident we can get it up and running by tomorrow afternoon, tomorrow night,” Magruder said.
Workers excavated loose rock and dirt and will have to rebuild the section of destroyed road, Magruder said. Details on the cost of the emergency contract are unknown.
The incident impacted both lanes, “with a large portion of the highway missing due to the amount and pressure of the fluid eruption,” according to the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District.
Bob Lochridge, operations supervisor for the Incline Village General Improvement District's public works department, said water was reported spewing from the district's effluent pipeline around 6:30 a.m. Saturday. The pipe was quickly shut down and no treated wastewater reached Lake Tahoe or its tributaries, IVGID and NLTFPD officials said.
“It's definitely not making it to the lake,” Lochridge said over the weekend. “That was our main concern.”
Crews from the U.S. Forest Service dug lines down the slope from the spill to ensure the wastewater would not reach the lake.
IVGID crews repaired the burst pipe by Saturday evening, said IVGID Engineering Manager Brad Johnson in a Monday interview. The cause of the break is being investigated, he said.
“We don't know why it leaked,” Johnson said. “It didn't fail in a traditional (location), at failing joints — it was in the centerline segment of the pipe.”
District officials are meeting this week to assess the incident, Johnson said, something that could affect the IVGID's effluent export pipeline project.
The failed pipe on Saturday was an older pipe that is not up for replacement in the $21 million project, which is co-funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Johnson said.
“When we scoped the project, it was not a portion of the pipe identified for replacement,” Johnson said. “It was identified then as being in the greatest of shape.”
IVGID finalized plans for the effluent export project in 2005. It is designed to replace and repair much of the 33-year-old, 21-mile deteriorating wastewater pipeline used to export treated sewage out of the basin, into the Carson Valley.
The district could determine in its investigation this week if the project needs to be altered to include replacing the area of pipe that failed Saturday.
“It's just too early to tell right now,” Johnson said.
In all, IVGID, NDOT, U.S. Forest Service, Nevada highway Patrol, Carson Fire, Tahoe Douglas Fire, Nevada Environmental Control and North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District combined resources to control Saturday's incident.
The stretch of road between Incline Village and the U.S. Route 50 intersection is used by about 5,500 vehicles a day, Magruder said, as it is the most popular route for commuters to and from South Lake Tahoe and the Carson Valley.#
http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/article/20090804/NEWS/908039995/1068&ParentProfile=1056
Researchers set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Mercury News-8/3/09
By Paul Rogers
Hoping to learn more about one of the most glaring examples of waste and environmental pollution on earth, a group of scientists will set sail from San Francisco today to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive vortex of floating plastic trash estimated by some researchers to be twice the size of Texas.
The bobbing debris field, where currents swirl everything from discarded fishing line to plastic bottles into one soupy mess, is located about 1,000 miles west of California.
"This is a problem that is kind of out of sight, out of mind, but it is having devastating impacts on the ocean. I felt we needed to do something about it," said Mary Crowley, co-founder of Project Kaisei, a nonprofit expedition that is partnering on the voyage with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
Crowley — a Sausalito resident who owns a yacht chartering company, Ocean Voyages — has been sailing the Pacific Ocean for nearly 40 years.
"More and more now, you see signs of marine debris and plastic everyplace. You can be at very remote beaches, and you'll see plastic bottles, barrels, toys and a lot of plastic fishing nets," she said.
Not much is known about the garbage patch phenomenon, including when it began forming or even its exact boundaries. Scientists believe trash — most of it plastic that won't decompose — washes down storm drains and rivers from places like the Bay Area or Japan, eventually drifting into several large ocean vortices where currents swirl like water in a drain.
Crowley formed a nonprofit group, Ocean Voyages Institute, which has helped raise $500,000 to send two ships to the garbage patch. Today, one of those ships, the 151-foot Kaisei — which means "ocean planet" in Japanese — sets sail for a 30-day voyage from San Francisco.
The other ship, the 170-foot New Horizon, owned by the University of California-San Diego, left Southern California on Sunday. It has a crew of about 20 people, many of them graduate students in marine biology, funded by a $600,000 grant from the University of California.
Both ships will study the garbage patch's size, how the plastic affects wildlife and whether it may be possible to clean some of it up.
"We are going to try to target the highest-plastic areas we see to begin to understand the scope of the problem," said Miriam Goldstein, chief scientist of the Scripps expedition. "The team of graduate students will be studying everything from phytoplankton to zooplankton to small midwater fish."
Additionally, the Kaisei will take a documentary film crew and a group of international scientists. They will conduct similar research to the Scripps scientists, along with experiments on whether certain types of netting and other equipment can efficiently remove the trash, perhaps recycling it or converting it into fuel during future cleanup voyages.
But cleaning up the Pacific garbage patch may not be possible.
First, most of the plastic is broken into tiny fragments. Plastic becomes brittle from the sun's ultraviolet radiation and eventually breaks up into minuscule pieces like confetti. Billions float just below the surface in the garbage patch, which is located north of Hawaii but shifts in size and location depending on the season and the currents.
"The large pieces, it is possible to pull them out of the ocean," said Holly Bamford, director of the marine debris program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md.
"The small plastic bits, that's to be determined. Until we understand the extent, the size and exactly where they are, we won't be able to make a determination of how they can be removed or if they can be removed."
Bamford, who has a doctorate in atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, said the plastic harms wildlife. Not only have albatrosses and other sea birds died from ingesting plastic, which fills their stomachs without providing nutrition, but also plastic pieces can absorb toxic chemicals, which then could migrate up the food chain, even potentially contaminating fish that humans eat, she said.
Old plastic fishing lines, some from drift nets that weigh several tons, also entangle thousands of sea turtles, whales and marine mammals every year.
From 1996 to 2006, the NOAA removed 1.1 million pounds of derelict fishing gear from the reefs and beaches of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a chain of mostly uninhabited atolls and islands that stretch 1,500 miles from Kauai to Midway, near the garbage patch. The beaches on those islands, because of their proximity to the currents known as the North Pacific Gyre, often are littered with cigarette lighters, fishing line, floats, toothbrushes, bottle caps and other floating junk, some of which is decades old.
In the central Pacific, there are up to six pounds of marine litter to every pound of plankton, and roughly 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the oceans, according to a 2006 report from the United Nations Environment Programme.
"This stuff is ubiquitous," Bamford said. "Plastics break into smaller and smaller pieces, but they don't decompose."#
http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_12985637?source=rss&nclick_check=1
Officials at border hail wastewater diversion system
Mexico's discharges won't flow into U.S.
San Diego Union-Tribune-8/4/09
By Sandra Dibble
Two new water treatment plants in eastern Tijuana have been praised as critical for some of the city's newest neighborhoods. But they also created a binational problem: How to keep the treated discharge from flowing across the border and harming a federally protected U.S. wetland?
Yesterday, authorities celebrated the solution – a computerized system of pumps and pipes designed to keep the treated water inside Mexican territory and deliver it to the Pacific Ocean miles south of the border at Punta Bandera.
Authorities from Mexico and the United States gathered amid tubes, pools and motors of Pump Station No. 1, a 40-year-old structure near the border fence that is now an important part of the project to divert the treated water from the United States. Officials said the solution highlighted their interdependence as they address issues in the Tijuana River watershed that spans the border.
“This is a model that we must follow in terms of cooperation between our two countries,” Baja California Gov. José Guadalupe Osuna Millán said. The state and the Mexican federal government are sharing the $5.3 million cost.
For years, cross-border sewage spills from Tijuana into San Diego County led to beach closings north of the border. While dry-weather sewage spills have largely been eradicated, wet-weather flows have continued to lead to closures.
With a combined capacity of 20 million gallons per day, the Arturo Herrera and La Morita treatment plants are key to relieving Tijuana's overburdened main facility at Punta Bandera. Arturo Herrera began operating in March; La Morita is to open later this year.
But without the diversion system, their discharges would flow into the Tijuana River channel, potentially devastating the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve in Imperial Beach. The federally protected wetland is a saltwater marsh vulnerable to freshwater flows.
Oscar Romo, coastal training director at the estuary, said the estuary's ecosystem has already been altered by some freshwater intrusion from canyons near the border. But the new system will avoid further intrusion and “would probably relieve some of those changes,” Romo said.
The new system, set to begin operating later this year, involves two parallel pipes. One will carry the treated flow to be released directly into the ocean. The second will carry wastewater for treatment at Punta Bandera. Currently all the water, treated and untreated, is sent in a single pipe to Punta Bandera.
By separating the treated water and sending it directly to the ocean, the strain on the Punta Bandera plant should be reduced.
By installing the new system, Baja California authorities are complying with a U.S.-Mexico treaty requiring that dry-weather flows not cross the border.
That is necessary to obtain funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has spent nearly $40 million on sewage infrastructure projects in Tijuana and Rosarito Beach.
“If they were sending water across, this would be a violation of the . . . treaty,” said Doug Liden, an environmental engineer with the EPA in San Diego.
Osuna said Baja California officials eventually hope to pipe the treated water to the Valle de Guadalupe, the state's main grape-growing region, for irrigation.
“I hope that the efforts at cooperation with treated water and sewage collection systems and the environment could be achieved with public security, for contraband, weapons and cash,” Osuna said.#
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