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The
County of San Francisco has a storm water infrastructure
that occurs in no other California coastal county
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a combined sewer and storm drain system (CSS). The
benefit of such a system is that typically everything
that goes into the storm drain system gets treated
before being discharged through a designated outfall
during dry weather. However, when the system is
overloaded,
usually due to a rain event, the CSS can discharge
both untreated urban runoff and sewage waste water.
In an
effort to reduce the number of combined sewer overflows,
the county and city have recently installed a system
of underground storage systems to handle major rain
events.
Because
of the CSS,
the county of San Francisco technically has no flowing
storm drains throughout the year, and therefore
is not
required to have an AB411 monitoring program. However,
there are two shoreline water quality monitoring
programs in the county: 1) County of San Francisco,
Environmental Health Department, and 2) the San Francisco
Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The Environmental
Health Department collects water samples at 10 locations
twice a month and at 29 locations once a month. The
PUC's monitoring program is required under their
National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES)
permit, and augments the county's monitoring program.
The PUC is required to monitor 20 locations, seven
of which are located on the ocean side of the peninsula,
a minimum of three times per week.
Unfortunately,
Heal the Bay has been unable to use the data collected
by either agency for two reasons: the sampling efforts
were too infrequent to derive enough samples to determine
an accurate picture of beach water quality and the
monitoring
programs did not analyze for all three indicators.
However, with the Environmental Protection Agency's
National
Beach Guidance and Performance Criteria for
Recreational
Waters grant funds being allocated this year by the
State Department of Health Services, the County of
San
Francisco should have a baseline monitoring program
this summer, which will provide usable water quality
information for beachgoers.
Sewage
Spill Summary
The county did not provide Heal the Bay with a summary
of beach closures due to sewage spills.
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