MIXING MARSHES WITH FISHERIES

Franklin Klopp, Arcata's Director of Public Works, is an athletic, compact man with gray hair and the perpetual tan of an outdoors person. Whatever problem he may have initially had with the low-tech approach to the city's sewage treatment dilemma, he also wanted to avoid the crushing costs of the regional system and the resulting political fallout. Klopp said:

We had two studies done by engineering consultants. I was leafing through them one day, not paying close attention. On the last two pages of one of them, there were figures that showed us running out of money just as the regional plan was completed. We had just doubled our sewer rates. I had taken a hell of a beating from rate payers. We would have to double them again for the regional system. I walked into the city manager's office and Sam Pennisi and Mayor Hauser were there. I said maybe we ought to try to get out of this one more time. They said, "Okay."

Klopp's greatest difficulty with the alternative plan was technical and imaginative: he could not quite envision how the idea was going to translate into reality.

Sam Pennisi recalls that Frank Klopp came to understand how the system might actually work in 1978 on a visit to Mountain View, California. Pennisi taught an environmental course at Humboldt State with Gearheart, the sanitary engineer who was advising the city on the waste-water treatment plan. "I think Gearheart had a good vision of what needed to be done, but up to that point, he had not been able to impart that vision, especially to Frank [Klopp]," Pennisi said. "Frank needed to see something."

The Mountain View sewer district in the San Francisco Bay Area was the site of an experiment using organisms to give tertiary treatment to sewage effluent, thus rendering it harmless enough to be safely discharged into the marine ecology. Klopp recalled:

That was a breakthrough. That was the first time we got the marsh concept. Before this it was just using the ponds for fisheries. Now we could use them to finish off the effluent and make it dischargeable. Up to then, we were looking, groping for an alternative. That's when the brainstorming started.

The city proposed to upgrade its existing plant to meet EPA's new discharge standards. Then the water from its sewage ponds would be channeled through a marsh the city would build. Cattails, bulrushes, and other plants and algae in the marsh would further cleanse the water, bringing it to the level of tertiary treatment. Some of the waste water would be used for raising salmon and trout. Releasing the fish and the treated waste water—clean water—into the bay could be thought to enhance it