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San Diego Magazine /  December 2007 /  A Sewer Runs Through It /  The Smell Test

The Smell Test

“THE MOST SUCCESSFUL sewerage systems are those that remain hidden to the public’s sense of sight and smell,” writes Chula Vista author and sewerage authority Jon Jameison.

One of the foremost challenges in building any city has always been water——where to get it and how to store it——and wastewater has always been an inevitable by-product. In 1880s San Diego, Old Town sewage was discharged into open gullies flanking the streets and eventually found its way into the bay. By the 1930s, the Navy was leading the push for a comprehensive wastewater-treatment system, because the bay had become so polluted that ship hulls were corroding. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that La Jolla and Pacific Beach stopped pumping sewage directly into the ocean, and by 1950, some parts of the bay were so polluted (at one time, more than a dozen outfalls discharged directly into the waters there) they couldn’t sustain marine life.

San Diegans flush everything from today’s laundry water and coffee grinds to the digested remains of yesterday’s fish tacos down the drain and rarely think twice about it. And although it’s not brain surgery that turns all of that raw sewage into tomorrow’s fertilizer——and increasingly into tomorrow’s drinking water——the modern marvel of efficient sewage disposal is complicated, arduous and costly. The labyrinthine 3,000-mile system that turns San Diego’s daily output of 180 million gallons of toxic human effluent into benign disposal products will cost taxpayers $476 million in 2008.

It’s money, pure and simple, that separates the United States from its developing neighbor to the south. The majority of Mexican cities have only begun treating wastewater in the past 20 years. Many, like the country’s capital (20 million people), don’t treat it at all. Tijuana has worked with the United States since the 1930s to deal with its wastewater issue. Efforts since that time have run into the same problem——keeping up with the capacity of a rapidly growing city, one that’s seen explosive growth in the past decade.