WHERE HAS ALL THE SEWAGE GONE? The Role of the Ironhouse Sanitary District In Delta Renewal
	OCTOBER 2005

by Tom Williams
Photos by Russell Byrne

Ironhouse Sanitary District is serving residents from Oakley to Bethel Island. We seem to be at the center of the water issues sweeping through California, and especially through our Delta area. The issues are huge, having to do with a system that supplies drinking water for 22 million people and irrigation for seven million acres of farmland.

The major issue, in my opinion, involves the very real prospect of levy failures that could occur at any time on any of the eight islands in the western Delta. We’re having trouble attracting attention to this problem. It is difficult to convince people how vulnerable our inland island system really is.

Political and regulatory agencies, unfortunately, have a much easier time paying hundreds of millions in reactive responses to calamities than in paying tens of millions in proactive steps to prevent costly disasters in the first place. Over the past three decades, for example, the state has spent less than seven million dollars a year for maintenance and restoration of the Delta infrastructure. Prop 50 currently allocates a mere 25 million a year on reinforcing all the islands. Ninety million dollars is needed right now, however, just to take care of short-term issues. To add more potential anguish, the money from Prop 50 runs out in June 2006.

Last year’s breach of the Upper Jones’ Tract levee, all by itself, cost 100 million dollars. If we had spent the 100 million on preventive measures, we could probably have stopped the break from happening while safeguarding against similar failures on any of the even more important western Delta Islands.

We could experience a disaster like the recent breach of the New Orleans’ levees. People knew that the levee system was endangered but political wil was lacking to make the necessary improvements.

Warning of a Terrible Danger
The Jones’ Tract break should have come as a wake-up call. The levee was breached along a stretch more than three football fields in length and flooded more than 12,000 acres of farmland with nearly 60 billion gallons of water that was drawn directly from California’s main source of fresh water. The break required more than six months before the levee was repaired and all the water was finally pumped out.

The greatest danger from one of these big breaks comes from the vortex that the inrushing water creates that then draws salt-water back up stream and into the intakes for our drinking water and irrigation. Fresh water from reservoirs behind Orville, Shasta, and Folsom is released in the face of any threatened salt-water intrusion. Even though Jones Tract is actually south of the salt water/fresh water line, the loss had to be offset by extra discharge from the upstream reservoirs, because the danger of saltwater intrusion was still very real. The surge of water into the tract might have been sufficiently large to move the line north into the Delta thus flooding some of the area with salt water.

The scary thing is that the Jones’ Tract is not one of the major western islands. If Sherman Island ever floods, for example, the impact on fresh water supplies will be enormous. As bad as it was, other potential levee breaks could make the Jones’ Tract disaster look like a picnic. Our fresh water supplies might be contaminated for months. Crops would be devastated. A big part of our economy would be wiped out. Area farms might be shut down for the year or more that it might take before the system stabilized itself, because the effects of contaminating soil with salt takes a long time to subside.

The threat comes from many sources. It is believed that beavers making holes in the levee might have been responsible for the Jones Tract disaster. Other threats include terrorists or a 500-year storm. Even worse, there is one chance in four that an earthquake severe enough to cause levees to fail throughout the Delta will occur in the next 50 years. This would flood the entire system with seawater. Farmlands would be deluged with saltwater, drinking water for most of the state would be compromised, and the ecology of the area would be irrevocably altered.

An Elevator with no “Up” Button
Subsidence poses another major threat to the integrity of Delta levees. The accumulation of river sediment and generations of decaying wetland vegetation over a period of eons formed the original marshy islands by creating deep layers of organic soil, called peat. During the 1800s the levees were built that transformed more than 95% of the marshes into farmland by cutting them off from the inundations of water and vegetation that kept the islands renewed.

Dry peat is subject to a process of oxidation that turns it into dust, which is carried away by the wind. It almost seems to evaporate. The effect of the lost soil is to continually lower the levels of the islands, as though they are all on some slow-motion elevator that never goes up. It’s been estimated that this subsistence lowers the island levels by an average rate of 1.5 inches per year, which means that the surface of the some of the land is now approaching 20 feet lower than when the levees were built during the 1800s. The top of a house built on land that was at river-level when a farm was new would now have sunk completely below the level of the water.

This tremendous lowering of the land exerts enormous pressures on surrounding levees and requires continual and expensive remedies. In addition, since almost all the islands have subsided in this fashion, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find appropriate areas in which to carry out projects that might restore the tidal marshes. Attempts to return the land to its original condition by letting in water would typically result in a 20-foot deep lake instead of a marsh.

I would like to work with the state for a subsidence reversal process. We need to build the land back up so that 20 years from now the elevator has gone back up a little. This could be done in several ways. An obvious solution would be to build a cutoff levee across one part of an island, flood the land to a controlled depth, and then permit tulle growth so that the peat eventually builds itself back up. I would like to see Ironhouse Sanitary District open up 500 acres of our own land for a subsidence reversal experiment. We could subdivide the area into plots, like rice paddies, and run experiments in various areas to identify a truly effective intervention. Right now small-scale research projects are being conducted, but we could be more effective by doing them on a larger scale.

Our Own Island
The Ironhouse Sanitary District bought the 3,500-acre Jersey Island in 1994. The island includes 16 miles of Delta levee. Besides being General Manager of the sanitary district, I’m also President of the Board of Reclamation District 830, which is the legal entity tasked with maintaining the levees. Our annual budget of 250 thousand dollars is only a fraction of the money necessary to sufficiently maintain the levee, so we must rely upon the Department of Water Resources’ Special Projects and Subventions fund to make up the difference.

During the past four years, we’ve invested a little over seven million dollars of state money in levee maintenance and have made significant improvements on the Jersey Island levees, including raising, widening, and stabilizing them. We also gather engineering data by making underwater and above water profiles of levees, that will help us identify the priority areas required to maintain the integrity of the levees.

The Ironhouse Sanitary District bought Jersey Island as a place where we can use our reclaimed water for irrigation. We irrigate part of the area and run cattle on the remainder. We do all the farming ourselves, including disking, sewing, cutting, bailing, and selling the products we grow to consumers. We use recycled water to grow crops like Sudan grass in the summer, and rye and forage mix in the winter. We use about a third of what we grow in our own operation and sell the balance to help offset our operating costs.

We also own and operate our own herd of about 2,500 head of cattle. We grow more hay than we use and sell the surplus to ranchers, and commercial feedlots. Ten cowboys manage the herd. Sometimes they ride ATVs rather than horses, but they are branding the yearlings and keeping track of the cattle just like cowboys have always done. Also, the cattle keep down the weeds more efficiently than would the fleet of mowers and crew of operators that would otherwise be required. The profits we make from the farming and ranching activities serve to keep our costs to consumers at a lower rate than if we just discharged the water into the river. Unlike most farmers, we have access to water 24/7.

Our Jersey Island activities don’t provide a perfect solution. Some of the island is not useable for any application. Our activities on the rest are seasonal and, unfortunately, occur during the summer months when we least need to find uses for our treated water.

The Right People in the Right Place
Ironhouse Sanitary District is a great place to work because of the excellent staff we have put- together. Our head wrangler, who actually holds the title of Jersey Island Reclamation Superintendent, is David Dal Porto. David holds an Agriculture/Business degree from Chico. He is the perfect person for the job because he has more than 25 years of levee experience and is a member of the neighboring Reclamation District Board. David has been in farming and ranching all his life. He manages the Jersey Island Cattle Company that handles our activities. He is responsible for all of the business including planting, harvesting, and marketing our products.

Jenny Skrel, our District Engineer, has a Masters Degree in Sanitary Engineering and has been a consultant for 25 years. I stole Jenny from the private sector. She has the task of designing our new wastewater plant. She will be great at the job, since she designed the Brentwood facility. With Jenny at the helm, we will be able to do all the project management and civil engineering design in-house. Jenny not only has the required technical knowledge, she has great rapport with the regulators whose standards we must meet.

Ironhouse staff also has the ability to do anything in the maintenance area. Neil Sterud, the supervisor, can perform miracles. Another machinist, Dave Smith, is a genius in a machine shop and can seemingly do anything with metal. He can create from scratch any valves and gates needed to replace parts that aren’t available any more.

I’ve been with the sanitary district, myself, for almost six years. I was previously an engineer in the County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, where I spent almost 14 years developing and managing the flood control project throughout all of Contra Costa County, as well as the unincorporated area’s clean water program. I am a Civil Engineer with a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Chico State.

On to the Future
We are planning a new wastewater treatment facility, in preparation for the build-out that is coming to the area. Even if development stopped today, however, we would still need a new facility because government regulations have increased and technology has advanced to the point that our 1983 plant is obsolete. The least expensive new treatment plant, costing 57 million dollars, would require us to discharge 100 percent of our water into the river. For seven million more we can construct a combination facility. The additional expense would be partially offset by the profits we could then continue to earn from our crops and livestock.

We’re going to have to raise rates, and borrow 50 million dollars, with a guaranteed payback. A second phase 15 years from now will be easier. We eventually need to dispose of our excess wastewater through some surface water discharge. We could put a discharge pipe and diffuser into the San Joaquin River, extend the pipeline three miles into the river and not affect levees or shipping.

We need a lot of help getting the required discharge permit from the state. We should be able to discharge our highly treated water into Marsh Creek, but we’re only asking for a San Joaquin discharge. This should be an easy sale, but it is increasingly difficult for entities not currently discharging into the river to get permission to do so. In particular, we must be able to mitigate the slightest presence of mercury in our discharge. The other problem is the natural salts in our water that our process isn’t able to remove. We are required to offset the worse case, but we actually would only need to discharge into the river during winter months, when rains are flushing the system and the amounts of salt become most low. We have to maximize our land application usage before we can even apply for a permit.

There are other alternatives to collection and disposal beyond our current cattle and crops programs that a new facility will make possible. For example, if we purify our water to the point that we can provide unrestricted reuse for irrigation purposes, we might then be able to also market the water for other purposes — electricity generation, for example, or any industrial application using water for cooling — rather than them taking potable water out of the system for the purpose. Wastewater distribution is carried through purple pipes. If we could get sufficient purple pipe into the ground, we could provide water to places like golf courses and parks. It would always be best for us not to have our eggs in one basket, but to have the flexibility built into our operation that would enable us to have appropriate responses to the changing demands of weather and emergencies, as they arise.

An Environmental Dream
I’m hoping that we can use Jersey Island as a pilot project for the subsidence reversal efforts I spoke of earlier. We don’t have to do this as a solo operation. The Water District is planning to put their irrigation canal underground. They could satisfy mitigation requirements by helping our efforts. Even more exciting, if we can get to the point of doing discharge into the river, we could partner with the neighboring Dutch Slough Restoration Project to stabilize levees in the combined area, which would permit us to open our land to other uses than membrane line storage. We could widen Marsh Creek and recreate tidal wetlands. We could do this by removing 750 thousand yards of material, which we would use for levee stabilization and for building up land to create the tidal marsh area.

The plans might one day result in our creating a dramatic showcase of environmental enhancement, plus providing a series of trails and display stations where people could come for hands-on lessons about our Delta ecosystem. The area could be transformed into a genuine multi-use facility. Few people know how lovely a stroll along a levee can be. Levees provide a source of serenity that is rare in this country. You will one day be able to walk your dog or simply hike the length of a trail. You will be able to go fishing, pheasant hunting, or simply commune with nature.

The Ironhouse Sanitary District can play the role of change agent for our community. Twenty years from now people might say about Jersey Island and Dutch Slough, “What a great place this is!” And “How beautiful nature is!” That would be a good legacy to leave behind. It would be a marvelous outcome from a process of treating sewage.