If you have ever been to San Francisco , then some part of you — or some former part of you — has almost certainly passed through the metropolis ’s Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant . But , considering how dead vital it is to the city , the sewer water plant life is also very much invisible , tucked off in a neighborhood no tourist would have hear of . brilliant and early one recent Saturday morning , Gizmodo proceed to see what San Francisco ’s sewerage plant is really like .
The Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant is the oldest and largest of the city ’s three , handling 80 % of all weewee that authorize through the metropolis ’s sewerage . ( Another , much modest effluent treatment plant life is located near the zoo and a third only comes online during the showery , winter season . ) In all , San Francisco ’s sewers include over 1,000 miles of pipe — enough to reach from San Diego to Portland . On an mean day , it treats 80 million gallon of wastewater . However , because the metropolis has one of the strange combined sewers that transports sewage and stormwater in one circle of pipes , that issue rise to the incredible 575 million on a showery day .
The Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant on Google Maps .
But enough with the numbers — how did it smell ? Not entirely unpleasant , pleasant here and there , sometimes nauseate , all depending on where you were in the process . To find out how raw sewage gets turned into clear urine that seagulls will gladly swim in , permit ’s guard our noses and embark . Our duty tour guide was Jonathan Smith , a textile examination aid for the SF Public Utilities Commission ( PUC ) with a Tennessee twang .
In the first footstep , bar concealment polish off the with child piece of debris , including tampon , wrap , and many art object of leaves . It does n’t smell out great here , but I ’ve been to public bathrooms that are worse . fine screens hit grit . All of this rubble and grit is moved by the truckload into landfill .
This wastewater intervention plant was build in the 1952 , and it emphatically shows in the controller way .
At the primary clarifiers , gunk mother a chance to settle down and scum is skim off the top . After this point , the sludge gets taken off to a goo blend tank . We ’ll follow the liquid and arrive back to the ooze later .
Like a dose of sewerage probiotic , atomic number 8 - loving bacterium and oxygen is pumped into the aeration basinful where they can jump breaking down any remain solids . When an odorous cinch came off of the basins , I was beginning to rue how I resolve to spend my Saturday daybreak . Jonathan warned us not to fall in . “ If you do , you ’d probably have the biggest staph contagion ever . ”
Closed aeration basins ( above ) and an open one .
Once the bacteria have done their job , the body of water is unmistakably cleaner . By the petty clarifiers , gull are splash about in the water .
Chlorine is added for disinfection and then neutralized by sodium bisulfite before it ’s eject into the Bay . The chemical smell reminds me of laundry , with a undefined undernote of dank .
But , man , back to the solidness . There is where I actually feel nauseated . polymer are contribute to the ooze to thicken it up on these belts .
In these 16 flannel-cake digesters , the solids get heated up to 95 arcdegree Celsius . This clip , bacteria that live without oxygen do their work , demote down the stay sludge over 15 to 30 Clarence Shepard Day Jr. . In that process , they give off methane , which is used to generate 50 per centum of the plant ’s ability .
The remaining material is spun down in “ biosolids , ” which are used to fertilize landfill cover and non - food crops . The industrial plant make 200 stacks of it a day . reckon about how much poop that must be everyday .
An Earthquake Would Destroy It All
At the end of the tour , it occur to me that San Francisco ’s aging effluent plant at night would be would a wondrously creepy-crawly setting for a horror movie . The skreak metallic element machinery , the dim sodium - vapour igniter , the peeled signs , and most of all , those pond of raw sewage . How fitting that the greatest risk would be drowning in our own waste material .
That ’s in reality not a terribly farfetched scenario . So much of the city ’s toilet system is more than a century old that we ’re one bad quake away from systematic failure . “ It is not a affair of if , but when the next earthquake will it the Bay Area , ” says the PUC ’s own literature .
The urban center ’s century - old pipes have also have an occasional habit of give out , leave the street to cave in . Because San Francisco has one of the rarefied combined sewerage organization where stormwater runoff and sewage all end up in the same plant , it also has to worry about how rising sea degree could back up the system and thus back up sewage . A 20 - year , $ 6.9 billion Sewer System Improvement Program to make badly needed upgrades is in the whole works .
A augury at the sewer water intervention plant life .
Toxic Tour and Sacrificial Landscapes
It ’s only when the invisible infrastructure breaks that we remember how disgusting our mob up waste really is . Living in a functional , modern city entail what we so seldom have to face that waste . Trash is picked up . Sewage is flush down the toilet .
For the people living next to a effluent intervention plant , though , it ’s harder to leave . The Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant is located in Bayview - Hunter ’s Point , one of the urban center ’s poorest and most marginalise neighborhoods . Houses sit just across the street from the plant itself . As you’re able to imagine , proximity to the city ’s sewerage does not do wonders for substantial demesne .
In fact , Bayview - Hunter ’s Point has long been where the city ’s unsavory substructure ended up . The neighborhood obligate just five pct of San Francisco ’s population but athird of its industriousness and toxic web site . That ’s thanks in large part to a former Navy shipyard turned Superfund site and a major coal power works that manoeuver until 2006 . A few age ago , an environmental group put together a “ toxic term of enlistment ” of the neighborhood .
Industrial landscapes like the oil domain of Pennsylvania or Chernobyl or northerly New Jersey can be called “ sacrificial landscapes , ” lay waste to so that the relaxation of us can live with our electricity and clean urine and consumer goods . mod lifetime in the urban center can only be so comfy because the resources and substructure that make it that way are conveniently hidden . But all our sewage has to terminate up somewhere .
Thanks toIntersection for the Artsfor organizing this tour of duty . you may set up your owntours of SF ’s sewer water treatment plantswith the Public Utilities Commission .
CitiesInfrastructureSan FranciscoSewageurbanism
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