Port Angeles Harbor Polluted With Raw Sewage and Stormwater
The Clallam County Environmental Health Division has warned the public to avoid contact with Port Angeles Harbor for the next seven days. After the recent heavy rains, the harbor has been swamped with about eight million gallons of stormwater and raw sewage.
posted by Tom Harper at 1:26 AM
27 Comments:
Max Mania was THE ONLY city council member who spoke up against the $50 million dollar crock of shit being built on our waterfront. If the city had listened to him, and taken his approach, we would have had downspouts disconnected years ago, a sensible system in place, and spills like this would be a thing of the past. But the city didn't listen to him, and now Max is gone. Let the raw sewage flow. Let the water and the foods it could provide become poisonous. Let the tax payers pay for the crock of shit on our supposedly beautiful waterfront. And let Port Angeles, once again, be a laughing stock.
I can't wait until the landfill spills into the strait, too. It'll be a nice garbage frosting on the big SHIT cake that the city of Port Angeles has baked.
And now there'll be better views of all the SHIT, thanks to the city building the new esplanade.
Help is on the way! The City's 5 million gallon Rayonier tank will soon be on line! Afterward, only 3 million gallons of sewage will pollute the harbor whenever it rains.
Crabs are gonna be extra yummy for the Port Angeles CrabFest, this year!
Mania was ignored, then vilified, because he made sense, both economically and environmentally. Too much reason is dangerous for the existing Clallam County operating system. The powers that be didn't just have to destroy his arguments, they had to try to destroy him personally.
Because if logic held sway, then there'd be no $50 million dollar toilet tank non-solution. But if the city wasn't doing the $50 million dollar tank, then there wouldn't be a $50 million dollar project for local politicians and other assorted scumbags to skim $$$ off of.
And if the $50 million dollar tank did actually work, then there wouldn't be any future need for more multi-million dollar projects for local politicians and assorted scumbags to skim more $$$ off of.
But of course, there will be future problems, and projects. And the scumbags will continue to skim, scam and graft, while the citizens suffer, struggle and pay and pay and pay and pay...
Clallam County is one of the worst places on earth. Shit in the water, shit in the air, and shit in the chambers of power.
As out-of-town architects candidly remarked a few years ago when they volunteered their expertise to improve the city:
"Port Angeles is so beautiful from a distance, but so ugly up close."
Sad, but true.
Ah shit, I done went and posted about that on my blog but my post won't show up until 2:00 AM in the morning.
Carry on......
Folks, there is nothing wrong with Port Angeles, if it only had a population of under ten thousand people that gave a fuck about each other.
If there wasn't so many of us here we wouldn't need an overflow shit tank, maybe Cherie should have stayed in Georgia rubbing her ass up against the governors mansion.
If the thousands of roofs were not connected directly to the sewer pipes, all that rain wouldn't get in, there would be no overflows. Why? Cuz there ain't no overflows when it don't rain hard.
With the City's shitty $50 million joke of a solution, all that rain STILL gets into the pipes, and STILL causes overflows.
As we see, the shit never made it over to the Rayonier 5 million gallon tank. It overflowed before it ever got there to be stored.
The city's solution to that? Dig up the streets and put in bigger pipes. But did we need bigger pipes to begin with?
Only when all that rain, from all those roofs, is dumped in. The existing pipes were plenty big enough for all the city's shit, just not all that rainwater.
But, why do the cheap, fast and easy solution, when you can hire all those contractors and consultants, and spend $50 million?!
I believe that in part the city is trying to do something about the runoff because of some government mandate. But don't quote me on that cuz I'm no frigging expert on it.
The old sewer pipes in town are so full of holes and cracks that groundwater seeps into them when it rains. This in-flow adds to the CSO's polluting the harbor.
The Public Works Department would rather spend millions on fancy new above-ground fixes than properly maintain existing underground infrastructure. Wouldn't it be a welcome surprise if somehow that entrenched city culture could change for the better?
Hey Anon 12:41 PM, October 05, 2013: I think what happened to Max Mania demonstrates what happens when someone tries to change that entrenched culture. ATTACK! And it's even worse at the county and the (shudder) port.
NOTHING is going to change anywhere in Clallam County any time soon. NOTHING.
The "government mandate" is for the city to quit violating the federal Clean Water Act. That's misleading.
For decades it has been illegal for anybody to dump pollutants into public waters (rivers, lakes, oceans). Port Angeles ignored the law and continued dumping raw sewage into the harbor - not to mention polluting the strait with garbage and leachate from its landfill. When confronted with evidence of the repeated CSO violations and the potential for incurring monetary fines, the city entered into a sort of "plea bargain" with Ecology (an Agreed Order). It promised to eventually stop the pollution if Ecology would give the city time to come up with a plan to prevent it. Ecology gave the city until 2015 to implement a plan.
Then came high-priced outside consultants who ignored cheaper fixes in favor of the bloated and obscenely expensive plan underway today.
Some say the city "bought the tank" and the $50 million fix because Ecology mandated this approach. Not true at all. Ecology simply told the city to quit breaking the law, and to figure out a way to comply with the law by no later than 2015. The city picked its own poison, so to speak.
NOTHING is going to change anywhere in Clallam County any time soon. NOTHING.
Well, you can't state that for certain, I may die and stop adding shit to this mess.
There is a long presentation from the City Engineer prepared back in 2011: http://www.cityofpa.us/PDFs/PWorks/CS0Presentation10-2011.pdf
It's 150 pages but a lot of them are just single pictures. It's a little hard to follow but does give a lot of detail on the problems with the current systems.
PS - What was that horrible noise coming from the direction of the mill? It started a minute or two before 8 PM and I can still faintly hear it. Are the breaking in the conveyor for the biomass incinerator? Funny how we haven't heard much about that lately.
Notice how the PDN "updated" their online version of this story at 1:22AM on the 4th, so all the comments are gone. Who updates a story at 1:22AM??? Oh, yeah...A paper that is torn between tearing this town down by telling the truth about it, and covering up all that is wrong here at the behest of their good ol' boy masters. Either way, PDN, the truth shines right on through: Fart Angeles is one sorry, fucked up little town.
Anon 8:08, do you REALLY believe anything that comes from the city Engineering Dept, after ALL the examples of stupidity that has been demonstrated in recent years?
I could fill this blog with pages of blatantly obvious "problems" with what the City Engineering Dept has stated, concerning the CSO issues, alone.
Anon 12:41 says " The old sewer pipes in town are so full of holes and cracks that groundwater seeps into them when it rains. This in-flow adds to the CSO's polluting the harbor." Let's put this theory into application in the overflow incident this thread is about. 8 million gallons of sewage flowed into the harbor after recent heavy rains.
Who thinks that the groundwater in October is high enough to cause 8 million gallons to get into the underground pipes, in a matter of a few hours of the rains falling? If it is groundwater, why isn't it still overflowing? Did 8 million gallons drain down all the ground water under Port Angeles?
Why do the overflows start and stop within a few hours of a rain event beginning and ending? Most sewer pipes in the city are under paved roads. How does the rainwater get into the pipes so fast?
The rain gets in so fast, because thousands of roofs in Port Angeles direct all the water they collect, right into the pipes. That is why the overflows start and stop so fast, in direct proportion to rain events.
Yes, the government mandated a solution, but Port Angeles leaders decided WHICH solution to build. And stuck taxpayers for the bill, which the finance director says has put Port Angeles to its' financial limits.
8:08 am Oct. 5 - here's the scoop
http://peninsuladailynews.com/article/20130901/NEWS/309019985/0/SEARCH
@ 9:43
Yes, I'm willing to believe the bulk of that particular report is accurate. If you have any specific reasons to doubt it's accuracy then we'd all love to hear them. It's foolish to discount the information for no other reason than childish tea party anger at big government and lazy, greedy government employees.
I assume you didn't take any time to read that report so let me direct your attention to a few specific pages. They have more detailed facts with more authority behind them than anything I've seen anonymous online commentors contributing to the discussion.
Page 81 identifies alley inflow contributing 32.7% to CSO volumes. These are grated manholes in the alleys throughout the city that drain directly into the sewer system. Impervious surfaces like driveways, saturated soils producing runoff and most likely a number of downspouts from roofs drain into these. The proposed fix of tearing up the alley to add pipe to drain them into the stormwater system instead of the sewer is obviously costly.
Page 92 talks about the contribution of inflow to CSOs. I assume inflow here to be primarily gutters going into the sewers directly. Residences contribute 13.7%, downtown a mere 5% (contrary to the constant claim of someone on the PDN comments that it is practically the only cause of CSOs) and the "eastern business corridor" whatever that is for 8.1%. So according to the city engineer gutters draining directly to the sewer accounts for only 26.8% of the volume of CSOs.
Page 102 - Infiltration and aging sewers accounts for 40.5% of CSO volumes. Page 110 identifies over half the manholes in the city being constructed with some or all brick. Pages 111 through 113 explain the nature of eroding concrete pipes, often in 4 foot sections meaning many more failing joints as well. They are all over the city too.
Page 118 summarizes these sources in a table and assigns a percentage of effectiveness in resolving them. Obviously this is where one could play with the numbers to make it go the way they wanted. However I think the percentages are reasonable considering the difficulties in implementation provided below the table.
The price tag they put on solving the CSOs by addressing each of those categories is $179 million plus an additional $7 million to deal with the sewer line in the harbor.
It's a complex problem and single-minded, absolutist positions in the discussion we have about it don't help at all. I don't like the CSO plan they adopted for a number of reasons but I can't think of anything better that has a high certainty of working.
Where is your brilliant plan to solve the problem? The tax-paying citizens of Port Angeles would like an alternative and it's not too late.
Whatever they are doing at the mill site today, it stinks and is emitting gobs of pollution into the air.
I smelled something rank in the air this morning but I figured it was a low tide or stale air from all the fog.
I hope the smell and noise isn't something we'll have to put with in the long term with this thing.
"Where is your brilliant plan to solve the problem? The tax-paying citizens of Port Angeles would like an alternative and it's not too late."
Yes, it most certainly IS too late. Max Mania (and Sissi Bruch) pushed for other less costly, more effective solutions to the CSO problem, rather than the ultra-expensive bandaid non-solution the city is hell-bent on buying. Alternate plans were never considered by the council, and were shot down under the banner of "staff says" we can't do it any other way. The so-called leaders didn't lead, and now PA is stuck. To repeat, it IS too late. The city council wouldn't change course when it would have saved them money and face. Now that they've already spent millions and millions of dollars on this boondoggle, do you REALLY think any of them (except Sissi) will have the courage to say "Stop! Let's do this differently." That seems nearly impossible to me, given the idiots (Kidd, Downie, Nelson-Gase, etc.) on the council. No change, no hope. It is too late.
@ Anon 4:25
Yes, If we are to believe what the City Engineer has stated,a staunch proponent of the very project defended in the document you make reference to, then we might as well believe everything any proponent of a project or industry states without question.
There is no Climate Change, because the oil industry spends millions in ads and bought scientists to tell anyone who will listen that all the people that are concerned about climate change are simply alarmists.
You say:"Page 102 - Infiltration and aging sewers accounts for 40.5% of CSO volumes." And you obviously believe this without question.
But, as I stated above, do you really think that 40% of the 8 million gallons of overflows that happen a couple days ago, came from "aging pipes"? That millions of gallons could really soak through paved streets to reach these broken pipes within a few hours? That, at the end of the dry season when ground water levels are at their lowest, ground water getting into "aging pipes" created those overflows?
I'll go back and get the page numbers that show the actual, recorded volumes flowing through the pipes, and their relationship to rain events. If you can understand simple graphs, you will see it obviously is an immediate impact.
(They were page numbers 35 and 36 on the previous version of that same presentation)
You say:" The price tag they put on solving the CSOs by addressing each of those categories is $179 million plus an additional $7 million to deal with the sewer line in the harbor." Yes, and this cost estimate included paying $594 for a rain barrel. Thurmans sells them for $49. But, don't bother to fact check what the project proponent cites!
Add up the volume of water those thousands of roofs put into the city's sewer system on a "per inch of rainfall" basis, and you will see that volume equals the overflows. The city does not dispute that these thousands of roofs ARE dumping all that water into the sewer. They just don't acknowledge the actual impacts.
Page 136 of the previous presentation by the same city engineer stated "41% of housing units" have their roofs connected to the sewer system. This does not include commercial buildings, most with bigger roofs. Where do you see ANY figures in the city's presentation telling us how much water these roofs are putting into the system? You do the math.
Interestingly, the presentation you make reference to goes on and on about how rain gardens cannot be built in Port Angeles, yet now the city is offering $500 for homeowners to build them!
You say: "Where is your brilliant plan to solve the problem? The tax-paying citizens of Port Angeles would like an alternative and it's not too late."
You REALLY think the City is going to abandon its' 5 million gallon tank system, now that it has so much invested?
People have tried to point out the many problems of this project, and suggested alternatives. Disconnecting the obviously major source of the water causing the overflows would cost a mere fraction of what the city decided to do. But, as with virtually every other project proposed in this city, the city council wasn't interested in hearing from anyone but staff.
BTW,I'm no Tea Party type.
I saw the article in the PDN about a new group forming about Climate Change. The first person on the contact list was Ed Chadd.
This is the guy who supports the Nippon biomass plant, and supports the City's $50 million CSO project.
I won't get involved in any group he is leadership in!
Ed Chadd is utterly clueless. I agree with the previous poster.
"You say:" The price tag they put on solving the CSOs by addressing each of those categories is $179 million plus an additional $7 million to deal with the sewer line in the harbor." Yes, and this cost estimate included paying $594 for a rain barrel. Thurmans sells them for $49."
Let's see. If the city can make a $49 rain barrel cost $594, then their $50 million CSO project would actually cost $4 million.
Or, if they inflated the cost of an alternate project 12 times ($49 to $594), then the current $50 million project CSO project would cost $600 million! Makes that $179 million look like a real deal.
Stupid town.
We have been looking to relocate to Port Angeles in retirement. I want to thank you for letting us know in advance what to expect. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960's and Port Angeles was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
No offense, but I think Republicans were in charge back then. It appears as if you have Democratic leadership intent on the destruction of Port Angeles along with the rest of America.
The only good thing we could find online about Port Angeles is the fact that there is only one registered sex offender living in the city.
The Doctor's Office, Colorado
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