A few weeks ago I braced my sniffer and joined a tour of San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plant. No, I’m not mentally ill. The Wastewater Enterprise Oceanside Plant sits directly opposite the break at Ocean Beach where I occasionally surf, and I wanted to know exactly what I’m swimming in.
Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Plant. Image Source: www.sfwater.org
The answer to that question turned out to be a lot less interesting than some other things I learned. Example: If a toothbrush is flushed down the toilet, it can, under unfortunate circumstances, melt inside a piece of high-performance equipment and cause $10,000 in damage.
It’s never occurred to me to flush a toothbrush down a toilet. I looked around at the 17 other people on this tour – kind, gentle people wearing red hardhats labeled “VISITOR” – and concluded that the kind of people who would tour a wastewater treatment plant on a Saturday morning are not the same people who commit acts of toilet-bowl terrorism.
This did not deter our guide, a stern, sixtyish woman named Catania, from enlisting us into the ranks of the hygienic. She passed on these gems:
— In order to get your hands really, truly clean, scrub your hands with soap for 20 seconds. This is as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice.
— A major contaminant of SF’s water is dog poop. San Francisco is home to 140,000 dogs, which is greater than its population of children, and with poorer bowel control.
— Another polluter is the new DeYoung Museum, the copper façade of which is leaching heavy metals into the soil of Golden Gate Park.
— When you put synthetic towels, like wet-wipes or Swiffers, or down the toilet, you make the sewer people very, very unhappy. These things don’t degrade, and they collect, and then somebody has to go down there and break up the big clumps of sewage by hand. Bad news. The same goes for cooking oil.
And we haven’t even gotten to the tour, which I will have to cover in another post.
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