The Blue Planet
L A Wood, Council of Neighborhood Associations newsletter, September 1992

Recently I saw a photo of the Earth taken from nearly l00 miles up in space. At that distance it is a blue planet. The image reinforces what I was told in grade school, that three quarters of the planet's surface is covered with water. In the picture, this majestic sphere is perfectly suspended and beautifully blue. Until recently, I had managed to hold on to this childhood image of a blue planet, a living planet. In the last several months, I have come to realize that the earth is dying a certain death.

Every day the oceans and groundwater are being poisoned. There has been an accumulative effect from decades of polluting our ground, air and aquifers. The blue has been transformed to gray. The planet still appears blue. Pollution in groundwater often times cannot be detected by the human eye. The environmental transformation has been gradual. A recognition of this fact came to me while being involved in an environmental stop-action directed at the City of Berkeley's Public Works vehicle maintenance facility.

We all have experienced seeing a dripping faucet in need of repair. Because it was not in our own home or because we didn't understand the magnitude of the water loss, we failed to act. Maybe we considered the environmental impact to be small. Perhaps it was someone else's faucet, so we said nothing and did nothing. The dripping faucet is symbolic of our past approach to issues of environmental pollution and is indicative of our failure to consider the drip to be our personal concern.

The community inside the Berkeley's Corporation Yard is a cross section of laborers, skilled and professional trades. It is the center for much of the City's activities and brings a multitude of City staff to the Yard. Yet, in the midst of all those eyes, at the southwest corner of the yard, there existed such a "dripping faucet." Nearly every working day Public Works dumped thousands of gallons of wastewater down the Yard's storm drain that then flowed westward into the San Francisco Bay.

In 1992 the practice of dumping hazardous wastewater into storm drains is illegal. This practice of Public Works goes back as far as most city employees can remember. Liken to the dripping faucet, it is perhaps conceivable to think that so many city personnel could see the pollution problem and not act. In Berkeley we have a Toxic Management, a special city department dedicated to toxic issues including that of illicit discharge and non point source pollution. Toxic Management's regulatory failure in perceiving this problem seems unthinkable, yet the process of discharging volumes of hazardous wastewater continued at the city's facility until April 1992.

The Public Works' daily procedures involved spreading storm drain inlet debris collections up slope of the storm drain and allowing the leachate and some sediment to enter the storm system. Solids were then placed into a local landfill. The leachate and sediment traveled through the storm drain portal and found itself in the Bay. Our neighborhood first got a sense of the problem because of the noise associated with this process. Bright and early each morning a city tractor with a scoop would attempt to corral the hazardous waste debris.

The backup horn on the tractor and the scraping would cause anyone to look over the fence as indeed we did. What we didn't expect to find was that this entire process was unnecessary. You see, Public Works already had a facility to accommodate this hazardous waste. This environmental polluting, like so much of what occurs, was senseless. In this case, the choice to pollute or not to pollute was not a matter of cost. It was a matter of being conscious of the issues. The idea of a Toxic Management Department in City government is progressive, but Berkeley's Toxic Management regulatory impact on this particular pollution problem was not.

Our West Berkeley group made a video to promote municipal awareness of the wastewater disposal and non point source pollution issues. Almost 100 copies of "Portal to the Bay" were directed at those responsible for developing water policy in the state. Included on this list were all nine regional water boards of California, all the counties of Region 2 which encircle the San Francisco Bay, and related environmental groups. Many dozens of municipal facilities have and will see "Portal to the Bay." The intent of our presentation was not to embarrass the City of Berkeley. We simply wanted to educate other municipalities, through Berkeley's mistakes, as to the seriousness of this environmental pollution. We also felt it important to point out some of the difficulties a regulatory agency encounters while attempting to regulate itself.

The problem of pollution cannot be blamed solely on the municipalities. Industrial, commercial and residential activities all contribute to polluting the eco-system of the Bay region. In Santa Clara County alone, an estimated 2.4 million quarts of crankcase oil are discharged into its storm system annually. Given that 1 gallon of oil can pollute 1 million gallons of water, it is no wonder that both experts and non experts are saying that the South Bay is dying.

The pollution begins in our neighborhoods and we all must become conscious of our part in harming the ecology of our region. As citizens we can no longer rely on government, its programs and their management to resolve all the problems with our environment. In our West Berkeley community it was necessary for residents to question and ultimately challenge the practices of our City's Public Works and Toxic Management Departments. Even the best of programs can be improved or better implemented. Our public concern does have an accumulative effect on the programs and practices that regulate our environment. Just ask Berkeley.