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Santa Rosa reverses more than 120 years of history
Published: Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, May 25, 2009 at 9:15 p.m.
It was nearly a quarter-century ago that Santa Rosa pledged to one day get its wastewater out of the Russian River.
That day has arrived.
For the first time since 1886 the city has gone a year without flushing a single drop of water from its sewage system into the river ecosystem.
“It’s unprecedented. No system in the world our size has recycled all its wastewater,” said Deputy Utilities Director Dan Carlson.
“It is fantastic. I am totally thrilled,” said Brenda Adelman of Guerneville, who began battling Santa Rosa over its river discharges following its illegal discharge of 750 million gallons of effluent into the river in 1985, a move forced upon the city because of nearly overflowing sewage ponds.
It’s an achievement credited to a confluence of factors: Increased pumping of the effluent to The Geysers steam fields to produce electricity, a relatively dry winter that substantially reduced the amount of rain-swollen wastewater the city had to treat and conservation measures that have cut flows from homes and businesses by 2 million gallons a day.
The results: 4 billion gallons to The Geysers, 1.7 billion gallons to irrigate 6,400 acres of farmland and vineyards, 500 million gallons to water parks, golf courses, school grounds and urban landscaping and 0 gallons to the river.
In comparison, the two smallest sewage treatment districts that release into the river — plants that serve the greater Guerneville and Occidental communities — discharged more than 85 million gallons over the same legally authorized period of time.
Santa Rosa’s achievement comes 24 years after the City Council passed a resolution following that controversial 1985 discharge promising to one day remove its effluent from the river altogether.
The resolution said “we have concluded that elimination of treated effluent discharge to the Russian River is in the best interest” of the city and it authorized pursuit of financial, engineering and environmental studies to attain that goal.
“I about had a heart failure when they did that,” said Miles Ferris, who then was working for a consulting firm hired shortly after the 1985 release to find a solution to what had become a dysfunctional wastewater treatment and disposal system. He’s now the city’s director of utilities,
The 1985 discharge enraged downstream residents, hundreds of whom attended emergency city meetings called to deal with the crisis.
“I had to change numbers due to threatening phones calls, and we had to have police escorts to protect Ken (then City Manager Ken Blackman) when he went to those meetings,” Ferris recalled.
“It was a difficult time,” Ferris said, one made more difficult over the ensuing two decades by the albatross that hung around the city’s neck — the pledge — that downstream river residents continually used to remind the city of its unmet commitment.
Former Mayor Schuyler Jeffries, who introduced the resolution, said he saw it more as a goal than a promise but said the council needed to do something to quell growing unrest. The massive discharge that year “was like dropping an atom bomb,” he said.
Occidental attorney Harlan Kant attended the meeting when that pledge was made and was quoted then as saying, “That’s wonderful if they follow through. I’d go for any alternative that would get it out of the river.”
Mike Downey served from 1985 to 2008 on the city’s Board of Public Utilities, the appointive group charged by the council to find a solution to the city’s sewage and disposal problems.
“We often had that commitment thrown back at us” during the board’s painstaking search for solutions, he said.
“We questioned if we could ever get out of the river completely. It wasn’t until The Geysers project came into play that we started to think maybe it could be accomplished,” he said.
Kant, now 60, notified that goal has been achieved, said “that’s wonderful” and hoped the city can do so forever.
Carlson said that is unlikely.
Carlson said there will continue to be the need to discharge during substantially wetter winters that can add up to 2 billion extra gallons a year for the treatment plant to process.
The amount of effluent the city must rid itself of can fluctuate wildly from year to year because the plant must deal with rain-swollen flows that on some days can push more than 100 million gallons through the plant for treatment, well beyond the 16 million gallons it processes on an average day.
Santa Rosa operates the regional plant, which treats sewage from Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Cotati and Sebastopol.
Under state water quality rules, the only time treatment systems can discharge into the Russian River is from Oct. 1 to May 14, a period when river flows are generally higher.
The figures used in this story detailing how much wastewater has been sent to The Geysers, agricultural and urban customers — groups that can receive the effluent on a year-round basis — are for May 15, 2008, to May 14, 2009.
Santa Rosa’s process is a weather-dependent system that relies on storage to keep illegal discharges from occurring. The city has a half-dozen reservoirs that hold up to 1.5 billion gallons that help fulfill summer irrigation needs for farmers and urban users.
The river and the creeks that lead to it long have been the dumping grounds for wastewater generated by cities and sewage districts that line the river from Ukiah to the ocean.
That includes Santa Rosa, which was a fledging city of a few thousand residents when it installed its first sewer line along Fourth Street in 1886. It emptied into Santa Rosa Creek.
“In those early days the way to get rid the stuff (sewage) was to pipe it into Santa Rosa Creek and let the rain eventually wash it away,” Ferris said.
That continued well into the 1940s before treatment plants began to pop up offering at least partial treatment.
Pam Jeane, chief deputy engineer for the Sonoma County Water Agency that operates the Guerneville and Occidental systems, said a veteran of her agency recalls “driving to work and seeing big white plumes of white foam” floating in Santa Rosa Creek in those days.
“It’s great to reuse the wastewater for beneficial uses rather than just letting it go into the river and ocean,” she said.
Kant, while pleased Santa Rosa isn’t currently in the river, isn’t entirely happy.
“We may not have as much sewage in the river but we don’t have as much water either,” he said, citing the growing thirst of upstream cities.
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