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Have you been to a Facebook Festival yet this summer?

The next Facebook Festival themed “Island Vibes” is taking place this Saturday, August 17th from 1:00pm-6:00pm at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. This will be the third of five Summer festivals.

The festivals are a popular activity for the whole community. Attendees can enjoy a farmers market, food trucks, live music, a kids zone, artisans, crafts and more.

This Saturday you can enjoy live music from: Mustache Harbor, Rafa, Jordan T, Thrive, Steven Espaniola, the Aloha Uke Squad, Ukulenny and your fearless leader. There is even a kid’s stage that will feature Lori and RJ/ Cotton Candy Express Music, Something Ridiculous and Martin and the Green Guitar.

The Festivals have something for all ages to enjoy. For more information, click visit their Facebook event page or visit their website.

Bullies beware:  The kids you like to push around are finding self-confidence – and a good left hook – at the Gladiators Boxing Gym.

Located in a converted warehouse on Arguello Street, just south of Whipple Avenue on Redwood City’s east side, Gladiators offers a low-cost alternative to the Peninsula’s pricier fitness clubs.  And the kids there, mainly Latino, mainly from the neighborhood, are learning not only to defend themselves, but also to avoid conflict simply by walking tall.

“Our biggest class is our kids’ class,” observes owner Tony Renteria.  “And most of them suffer from bullying at school, or (a lack of) self-confidence.  So we kind of show them teamwork, and make them take the lead, so they feel important, so they feel like their voice is heard.  And through boxing, they build confidence, knowing that they know how to defend themselves.

“And maybe because they go through intense workouts, it’s also an accomplishment.  And after a while, they do controlled sparring, and that actually shows them what they’re capable of doing, without any fears.  Their confidence level rises, they’re more sociable, and they stand up against people who are bullying them.”

Sitting within an auto-towing yard and dimly lit by occasional fluorescent lights, the gym is a long ways from luxurious.  But like the humble upstairs dance studio in the Broadway musical, “A Chorus Line,” even if it isn’t paradise, it’s home.

More than 25 years’ worth of trophies line the walls.  Speed bags and long, cylindrical heavy bags hang from the ceiling.  Weight-lifting stations dominate one corner, and a heavy tire sits on the loading dock, waiting to be picked up and heaved against the wall.  Also draped from the ceiling are a dozen flags from countries as far-flung as Kenya, Jordan, Germany, the Philippines and Peru, as well as the United States and Mexico. They all represent the home countries of boxers who have trained at the gym.

Then there are the centerpieces – two boxing rings defined by red-white-and-blue ropes.  Two boxers – 19-year-old Omar Tapia and 27-year-old Esteban Zacarias – are wrapping their wrists, slipping into boxing gloves and heavily padded headgear, and adjusting rubber mouthpieces.  An assistant, Hector Pardo, stands by with a video camera.  The electronic bell clangs, and the three-minute round begins with Tapia on the offensive, coming after Zacarias with a combination of left and right jabs.  Zacarias gives ground, bounces around the ring, then lands a roundhouse punch to Tapia’s headgear.

“Jab, jab!” Renteria hollers as the two boxers circle each other warily.  “Keep your hands up!”

The round ends, and Zacarias and Tapia tap gloves.  Neither plans a boxing career.  Zacarias, who manages a computer system for the Palo Alto Unified School District, is at the gym for conditioning and weight-loss; he’s dropped 20 pounds in six months.  Likewise, Tapia, who graduated from Woodside High School in June and plans to attend Cañada College, comes for the workout.

“It keeps me disciplined,” Tapia says.  “Just coming every day, training hard, it keeps me in good shape, too.”

Renteria says most of his clients come for exercise and to learn self-defense.  Others – particularly kids – want to acquire social skills.  Children arrive as young as age six, although USA Boxing, the national organization that governs amateur fighting, doesn’t allow them in the ring until they’re eight.  Until then, they practice footwork and work out on the bags while building confidence, strength and coordination.  Just a handful of young people are currently competing against boxers from other gyms; as Renteria wryly notes, “You’ve got to be pretty special to get hit in the head.”

Which brings up an important question:  Even at a recreational level, is boxing dangerous?

Renteria acknowledges the potential for injury “if the coaches don’t know what they’re doing.  But that can be in soccer, too.  That can be in football.”  For its part, USA Boxing has certification requirements for coaches that focus on safety as well as professional competence.

Two young women who aren’t afraid to mix it up at the gym are Mariana Gonzalez and Alexis Gomez.  While working out at Gladiators, both qualified in March for the U.S. Olympic trials, to be held this December in New Orleans.  Gonzalez, 20, won her shot in the 112-pound weight class, and 25-year-old Gomez made it at 165 pounds.

For Gomez, especially, it’s been a long and ultimately satisfying road.  Growing up in South San Francisco, she began boxing at age 15 to fight off – literally – the effects of childhood obesity.  On her way to losing 50 pounds, she started sparring with a friend and discovered she liked it and was good at it.

Her first competition came in 2017; since then, she’s gone 10-0 with two technical knockouts.  Because relatively few women fight at her weight level, she often finds it hard to get a match.  Still, she says, her workouts provide an outlet from daily stress, and she believes she’s becoming a role model by being what she describes as a “strong-figured woman.”

Gonzalez, who lives in Sunnyvale and hopes to go to medical school (she’s currently majoring in biology at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills), credits her brothers, Leo and Nicholas, for her initial love of boxing.  With the support of her family, she started training with Renteria and his own mentor, Eloy Ramirez, who founded Gladiators in the 1990s.

“When we’re training, we always push each other to the limit,” Gonzalez says.  “It’s overall a great community because we all learn from each other, we all support each other and we all have a great time.  But at the same time, we’re all working hard and trying to do the best we can.

“Tony’s great,” she continues.  “He makes everything easier and enjoyable.  He also teaches us how to have that mentality in the ring, where we can’t have anything affect us.  He really does allow me and all the other fighters to have a clear mind.  When it comes to boxing, people often think it’s who hits the hardest and who’s the fastest.  But really it’s all about mentality more than anything, because you can go in there and be the fastest and strongest person in the ring, but if you don’t have the strongest mindset, then it really affects the whole game.”

Gomez, who started sparring and weightlifting at Gladiators last November, says Renteria was “very helpful and supportive from the first day I walked into the gym … Then I saw how much heart and how much love he put into all his fighters, when it came to getting ready for competition – the mitt work (practicing with a partner who wears a heavy mitt to absorb punches) and the different types of technical drills he did.”

In addition to working with Renteria, Gomez continues to train with longtime coach and former World Boxing Council heavyweight champion Martha Salazar of BabyFace Boxing in Pacifica, and with coaches Blanca Gutierrez at BabyFace and Eliza Olson at Gladiators.

Renteria understands that talents such as Gomez and Gonzalez come along only once in a while.  As much as he loves competition, he realizes Gladiators’ main business is providing a workout and what he calls “a safe, natural high” for his clients.

“If you’re into working out hard, and you’re doing weightlifting and stuff, and you want to try something new, this is a good way of doing cardio,” he says.  “It’s like running with your hands or your arms.  You’re punching, punching, punching.  Most of the time you’re just used to running with your legs.  So if you combine the running with the punching – oh, man, that’s weight loss, for sure.”

For Renteria’s client Esteban Zacarias, the workout is undeniable.  Sweat drips from his face as he steps out of the ring after his sparring session with Omar Tapia.  He says boxing is a tradition in his family, and even though he’s doing it mainly for exercise, he also enjoys the rough competition.

“It’s good,” he says.  “It’s very challenging.”

And now a new challenge awaits the gym.  A Southern California development firm is proposing a large condominium project for the property and its surroundings.  Renteria says he has until the end of next February to find a new location.

Will a 25-year-old Redwood City business be knocked out?  Renteria has consulted a local commercial real-estate firm to find another place.  But for now, at least, the home of Olympic hopefuls and newly confident neighborhood kids remains in limbo.

This story was originally published in the August print edition of Climate Magazine. 

Baron Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, the greatest flying ace of World War I, was a legend in his time, and beyond. He was credited with 80 kills between 1916 and 1918, when he himself was shot down over France. He flew many of those missions piloting the Fokker Dr.I tri-plane that he’d painted his favorite color, earning him the sobriquet “The Red Baron.”

But then, he never had to do battle with a five-year-old.

“The experience here in the museum is a five-year-old kid can break anything,” says Mike Fox, one of the team of volunteers at San Carlos’s Hiller Aviation Museum tasked with recreating a static model of the Baron’s signature plane. “But the management here decided they want to allow people to have access to the airplane, to get in the cockpit and move the controls and use it for a photo op. So we had to pretty much kid-proof it.”

Some of the volunteers are former amateur pilots, like Fox, or they were machinists, engineers, or just airplane enthusiasts. Nearly all of them are retired, and like the docents who patrol the hangar-like structure, they come twice a week for the fellowship, and to get their airplane fix.

“I’ve never flown,” says Don Torburn, who has been supervising the team’s model making for two-and-a-half years. “I was mechanical engineer, which probably helped me more than flying.” He started working at the museum about 19 years ago (“That’s longer than any job I ever had”) and manages to make the two-mile commute almost every Tuesday and Thursday without getting on the freeway. He oversaw the building of the volunteers’ longest job to date, the Buhl Autogiro replica that took five years to complete, and as he approaches 90 he is used to the ribbing, and the respect, the rest of the team gives him.

Take the Baron, for instance. The younger-than-90 set may first think about Snoopy, who battled the Red Baron in comic strip and song in the sixties, rather than the actual von Richthofen.  To that, Torburn responds, “The Baron and I were buddies.”

The museum, named for the remarkable Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur Stan Hiller, is now in its 21st year. Hiller started building ray guns and toy race cars when he was 14. “And then at 17 years old, he got the idea that he wanted to build a helicopter,” says museum VP of Operations Willie Turner. After teaching himself to fly, and several false starts (the 1940s were quite a bit pre-YouTube video), Hiller and his team built the first “Hillercopter,” which he piloted in Memorial Stadium on the UC Berkeley campus.

The original was donated to the Smithsonian, leaving the volunteers to create a replica for the Hiller Museum. That was difficult and time-consuming, but nothing compared to the Buhl Autogiro—which might have been easy for Leonardo. They had to recreate their model through photographs and research, which took about five years. “In that case we had to make the wings, the coach, everything. Because all we had was the cockpit pod,” says Torburn. When it was finished it was appraised at $640,000.

Building the Fokker has been painstaking in a different way. The museum bought the model from Digital Design in Phoenix, AZ, and soon discovered that much had been left to the imagination, and interpretation, of the builders.  There were some issues with the propeller, and the machine gun (non-functional, of course). But mostly it was about the details.

Take the wing ribs. They may sound delicious but as any pilot can tell you, they are essential to each wing of an airplane. This was a three-winged airplane, mind you, and each wing rib had plywood webbing in the middle, as well as a plywood cap on the bottom and the top.

“The only parts that came in the kit were the webbing in between,” says Fox. “So we had to form the all the other pieces, and then create a chance to glue them together so that everyone looks like every other one.” His skills are in woodworking so he did more than his share of the gluing, and waiting for the glue to dry. In a six-hour shift, you might get half a dozen ribs done, and when you’re only coming in twice a week and there are hundreds of ribs, the job stretched out over the years.

According to volunteer Dean Williamson, the guys in the shop met with Hiller CEO Jeffrey Bass last year to discuss the fate of the Fokker. “Jeff wanted a time frame and said, ‘When do you think what will be done?’” recalls Williamson. “And one of the guys said, ‘June!’ and Jeff says, ‘Okay!’ Then the fellow turned around and said, ‘But I didn’t tell you which year!’”

Now the volunteers are optimistic that the model plane will be completed by August. “Now we’re getting to the point where we can start climbing the aircraft and hopefully within the next couple of weeks we’ll be able to paint it and start putting it together,” says Williamson.

One of the reasons their jobs take so long is that the men in the shop are always on call to repair what has just been broken. Make a visit to the museum on Skyway Road east of U.S. 101 in the summer, and you’ll see the problem: Scores of kids from summer camps and schools swarm the space, climbing on everything they possibly can and treating nothing gingerly.

“Being a pilot, when you’re flying, you’re pretty gentle on the controls, you’re using one or two fingers and making very small, slow movements,” says Fox. “But when the kids get in the airplanes, or the flight simulators that we have here, boy, they’re slamming those controls up and down the right and left with all the strength they have.”

The Fokker Dr.I is expected to be one of the most loved, and hence highly maintained exhibits in the museum. “It’s a full-time job for the shop doing the maintenance on the other aircraft on display,” says Fox—and this wasn’t supposed to be a full-time job.

“We’ve got the standing joke around here,” says Williamson. “If somebody wants to go on vacation, take a day off or something we always say we’re gonna have to dock their pay.” Williamson first came to the museum when he was inspecting the property as a member of the Redwood City Fire Department, where he worked for more than 28 years. After retiring he was invited to work there as a volunteer, and has been there ever since.

Turner says the museum will build a whole display around the Fokker, putting the plane in context, describing dogfights and World War I itself. What they have learned at the museum over the years is that most people don’t know much about anything that they are seeing.

Take their replica of the plane the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903 (the original hangs also at the Smithsonian). “We figured everybody knows the story about the Wright Brothers,” says Turner, a former pilot himself. “We’ll move on from that. And it turns out people don’t know the story of the Wright Brothers. That’s one of the greatest inventions known to mankind. So we said, ‘Well, we’re an aviation museum, we better tell that story.’”

The Wright Flyer, as it’s known, is just a stone’s throw from another replica: Spaceship One was the first civilian aircraft to go into space, in 2003—on the hundredth anniversary of man’s flight.

“We let people go in and sit in the cockpit, pull the switches to, play with the controls,” says Turner. “Most museums don’t let you do that, especially in an artifact like that; they don’t want you to get in it because you’re going to break something. And people do, things break all the time. That’s when the guys in the shop go out there and fix stuff.”

This story was originally published in the August print edition of Climate Magazine. 

They may offer just the basics for that most basic bodily function: a bowl, a seat, a tank, a handle and the inner workings designed for no-fuss, no-muss dispatch. Newer, luxury models, on the other hand, utterly redefine “going in style” with their integrated air-deodorizer options, the heated seats, foot warmers, built-in night lights, two-user memory, and music. The quiet-closing lids of top toilets will even rise in welcome as the user approaches the throne.

When business has been taken care of, it’s flush (whether by human hand or by the action of an intelligent toilet) and forget. It goes down the toilet. It goes away. Out of sight and out of mind. But not to people like Bob Donaldson, who spent a career in an industry with the sanitized name of “wastewater treatment.” Thirty years ago, says the Walnut Creek native, it made his De La Salle High School reunions “interesting” when he told former classmates about his role in the process of moving waste from sewers to a destination people may also not like to think about: San Francisco Bay.

“It’s not a very glamorous subject,” he says. “… People have a tendency to avoid anything their body defecates, whether it’s sweat or odor or mucous or ear wax. And, if you think about it, the things that our bodies naturally release have been the source of multibillion-dollar industries. And we are no exception to that. We fall under the category of the ‘eewww’ category.”

Unsuitable conversation in a polite magazine? Not at all. For communities across the nation with aging sewage treatment plants, public sanitation looms the capital improvement elephant in the room.  Southern San Mateo County is among them, confronting significantly higher sewer rates to pay for the first major wastewater conveyance and treatment upgrades in nearly 50 years. The first time around, the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 picked up the tab. “Now here we are,” says Donaldson, “the treatment plants that we built in the 70s, early 80s, have worn out. The federal government says, ‘We paid for the first one. The second one’s on you.’”

Finding ways to dispose of waste is as old as civilization, with evidence of the first lavatory-like plumbing systems as far back as 3200 BC in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The Babylonians molded clay pipe for drainage. The Romans are often credited as sanitation pioneers for the citywide infrastructure they’d installed by 100 AD, including communal public latrines.

Redwood City got its start as a logging port, and, as the town grew, outhouses soon were no longer up to the job. A city ordinance passed in 1893 established rules for constructing, maintaining and connecting to sewers and provided for the appointment of a sanitary inspector. A $23,718 contract was awarded that year to build the initial system. Early sewer pipes were made out of hollowed out redwood logs.

Life on the Peninsula today would quickly grind to a halt without the underground grid that carries waste from homes and businesses, sewage tributaries that course under city streets and connect with larger pipelines and finally to pump stations east of U.S. 101. They, in turn, propel the effluent miles onward, some of it under Bair Island and under San Carlos Airport, and all of it under Redwood Shores and on to the Silicon Valley Clean Water treatment plant where “out of sight, out of mind” does not apply.

On an average day, about 13.5 million gallons of wastewater flow into the plant located on Radio Road, next to the bay. In prolonged, heavy rain, flows can push up against the plant’s current capacity of about 72 million gallons. (Storm water may infiltrate through old sewer pipes or in ones that have cracked or separated, adding runoff to the wastewater.) Improvements that are coming through SVCW’s $495 million Regional Environmental Sewer Conveyance Upgrade program will increase capacity to about 100 million gallons, according to Director of Operations Bob Huffstutler. The RESCU program is being undertaken due to the cost of reliably maintaining an aging system in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment.

The treatment plant offers a peculiar window into the daily lives of its 220,000 customers, in cities from Belmont to Menlo Park and beyond. On weekdays, says Huffstutler, flows start to increase about 7:30 or 8 a.m., after people get up, take showers and use the toilet. “And they stay pretty high until about 3 or 4 in the afternoon,” he says. “People go home. Flows drop off a little bit, and in the evening, they start picking up again. People start cooking, going to the bathroom, those kinds of things. It’s called diurnal flow pattern.” There’s a five-hour window during the wee hours of the morning when repairs can be done. On weekends, it’s the same pattern but an hour or two later. During the holidays, flows drop off about 20 percent from normal.

At the plant, the sewage goes through a complex physical and biological process that starts with primary sedimentation tanks, where settling and skimming removes solids, floating grease and scum.  Bacteria is used in the multi-step process whose goal is to remove more than 97 percent of all solids and organic material and 100 percent of pathogens from the wastewater. For a complete description of how it works, go to wwww.svcw.org/facilities/wastewater treatment

Altogether, from that first morning flush, through the treatment process, it’s about an eight- to 10-hour trip from the toilet or the bathroom sink to 50 feet deep in the bay, via an outfall pipeline. Although plants with a deepwater discharge normally are required to do only secondary-level treatment, SVCW must treat to the same tertiary-level as plants further south in the Bay where water is shallower and less dilution happens.

By the time the laundered wastewater gets to the bay, it may not be deemed drinkable, but fish get along in it swimmingly. That’s actually one of the ways (by regulation) that SVCW checks its own process. For the last two years, 95 to 100 percent of the 15-to-30-day-old rainbow trout fry dumped into a laboratory fish tank for regular testing have survived, according to Laboratory Director Bob Wandro. But they have to be destroyed afterward (also by regulation).

“They’re indicative of what life is out in the bay,” says SVCW’s Manager Teresa Herrera, an avid animal rights person who is dismayed that “they survive the test and we have to kill them. It’s a regulation. I honestly don’t know why.”

The wastewater treatment industry is indeed highly regulated, at ever-increasing cost, but it’s also thanks to regulation that facilities are safer places to work and the bay was cleaned up. San Mateo County Public Works Director Jim Porter grew up near the Marina Court area of San Mateo when the sewer plants and garbage dumps were all along the bay.

“(The mud) was black underneath from all the oil and crap that was in the bay mud,” he recalls. “I don’t know what it’s like now but it was awful then.” He guesses that sewer rates have doubled in the 12 years since he’s been in his position. “But the quality of the water in the bay is improving and that’s a direct result of these requirements that these regulatory agencies are placing on people. So although nobody likes to pay higher sewer bills, if you look at the impacts on the environment of all of these regulations over time, as a Bay Area resident, I think it’s a pretty good idea.”

Each city in the joint powers authority sets its own sewer rates, but they’ve been going up, in large part, to pay for the SVCW upgrades. The basic rate in Redwood City has gone from $35.66 a month in 2007-08 to $78.24 this fiscal year. In San Carlos last year, the annual fee (on the property tax bill) was $1,175, and in the West Bay Sanitary District, in Menlo Park, the base fee was $1,126.

Growing up in Walnut Creek, Donaldson vividly recalls riding in the back seat of his dad’s 1960 Pontiac going to visit his grandmother in San Francisco. “We’re holding our nose because the bay stunk,” he says. “It stunk like a sewer.” Treatment plants across the nation were rudimentary, but the 1969 Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act in California expanded enforcement authority through nine Regional Water Quality Control Boards. The federal Clean Water Act required plants to go to higher treatment levels and provided funding. With Bay Area population growth since then, “had these laws not been passed, San Francisco Bay would have been dead long ago, and when I mean dead, I mean filled with waste that consumed all the oxygen. And with no oxygen, no life. It would be just a giant cesspool.”

Donaldson got into wastewater treatment in 1979 in the East Bay but came to work in 1985, first as a supervisor, at the South Bayside System Authority, SVCW’s former name. The joint powers authority includes Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City and the West Bay Sanitary District in Menlo Park, which also takes in Atherton, Portola Valley, parts of Woodside and East Palo Alto, and some unincorporated areas.  Donaldson ultimately advanced to operations manager of the plant, which has been in operation since 1982.

In the early 1980s, the wastewater treatment operator’s job was one of the most hazardous in America, he says. Across the country, treatment plants were popping up overnight but the knowledge about how to operate in confined spaces with the toxic gases that are created from decaying waste sometimes lagged behind. Workers could find themselves trapped in toxic pockets. Gas detectors weren’t being used, says Donaldson, and “somebody would see somebody through a porthole that had passed out, and before we understood what was happening, somebody would rush in to save them and would be overcome by the same gas.”

Donaldson barely made it out alive with his own close call once while down in a tank with a three-inch firehose to clean it. Trying to ensure that the tank was thoroughly disinfected, one of the foremen, thinking he was doing the right thing, turned up the chlorine concentration in the water too high. “So when the water came out, the chlorine instantly atomized and I was instantly stuck,” Donaldson recalls. “I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.” He managed to climb a 40-foot ladder and, once out of the tank, began projectile vomiting.

“I just laid there and slowly started catching my breath and I remember just feeling so happy that I got out of there,” he says. “And then took a shower and finished my shift. … And then it just turned into a good story. You didn’t go home for stuff like that. … There were lots of things that we would never do that they just saw as the regular way of doing things back then. Thank goodness for regulation, safety training and people getting smarter.”

At SVCW, safety messages are all about, as is hand sanitizer. Visitors touring the plant are admonished not to touch their faces or their mouths. Signs on the aeration tanks warn not to drink the water. There’s a life ring (never used) on the side of the tank.

Since becoming general manager a year ago, Herrera has put a lot of energy into safety. Industrial sites, she says, are safer than they used to be, but the treatment plant has a lot of contaminants. “Just imagine what you flush down the toilet is what these guys have to be around day in and day out,” Herrera says. “So it’s extremely dangerous.” People aren’t allowed to work around the aeration tanks without proper personnel around them and protective gear such as harnesses and life ropes, and there are various levels of confined space classification. That said, Herrera is an enthusiastic proponent of careers in wastewater treatment – there are jobs for those with high-school to advanced degrees.

Like a handoff in a relay, before SVCW receives the wastewater flow at the pump stations, cities and San Mateo County are responsible for conveying the slurry via a vast, invisible network of sewer pipes of varying age and condition, to which private property owners connect by lateral pipes. In Redwood City, that’s 200 miles of sewer pipe, about 210 in the West Bay district and more than 105 in San Carlos.

The county also administers 10 sanitary sewer districts from the Burlingame Hills to the Fair Oaks Sewer Maintenance District, some with relatively few (400 or 1,500) connections. Fair Oaks, at 11,000, is the largest, according to the county’s Porter. Years ago areas like Emerald Lake Hills – initially developed with “summer homes” — were on septic tanks, but as these began to fail, sewers were installed, financed through assessment districts. As former county areas incorporated into cities, they took over those districts. That’s how the county is left with the remnants.

Each one operates with its own, separate enterprise funds, which can only be used for operations and maintenance of that particular district. Over the years, Porter says, the county has tried to get adjacent cities to take them over “because we think it’s good government.” Residents lose out on economies of scale. In addition, service calls are dispatched out of Redwood City, which increases response time. Agencies must report spills to the Regional Water Quality Control Board, with substantial fines and enforcement action a potential risk.

“It’s the economic benefits of being part of a larger group,” Porter says. “And that applies to all of our districts. So we’ve got these small districts that are flowing into Redwood City who now have a very large obligation to pay off their share of that plant. So we constantly will work with the cities to try to combine the districts. However, it’s a bit of an uphill challenge because of all the liability issues and the regulatory issues and the cost issues. And that’s why it’s a problem.”

Redwood City hasn’t been subject to fines or enforcement action, and Public Works Director Terence Kyaw says his staff tries to stay on top of things so sanitary sewer overflows – aka “SSOs” – are rare. Each must be reported in detail in the California Integrated Water Quality System – from location (by latitude and longitude) to how many gallons were recovered. Kyaw says Redwood City averages 10 to 15 SSOs per year.

Throughout the year, both city and county crews examine pipes for problems like root intrusions, using closed circuit TV for inspections. Fats, oils and grease (aka FOG) are prime offenders, and outreach is made to restaurants and multi-family dwellings not to pour FOG down the drain.  “Those are like a liquid ball,” says Kyaw, “but as soon as you hit that sewer main, this is about 10 or 15 degrees cooler underneath. It kinds of gels up, just like cholesterol in our system.” Sometimes a rotary saw is needed to cut a solid greaseball out of the pipe. “It’s almost like beeswax,” he adds. “It’s incredible.”

The city has six “smart” manholes, which monitor flows and sound an alarm when they’re on the rise. Crews can go out and take a look before the situation becomes an SSO, and Kyaw can read updates on his desktop or phone.  Sometimes residents with flooding problems illegally hook up downspouts to the sewer line.  If caught, they get a talking to about not super-charging the sewer system.

Redwood City’s sewage flows downhill by gravity, mingling with contributions from other outside the city, through tributary pipelines that feed into a large trunk at Walnut Street and Veterans Boulevard. The effluent then goes through the Maple Street Pump Station, and from there, the river of sewage is pumped north. It converges in Redwood Shores with Belmont and San Carlos’s, headed to the treatment plant.  The Redwood Shores area is flat, and there are 31 neighborhood sewer pump stations, each with a wet well, according to Kyaw. The pumps keep sending the sewage on to the next well and finally to the SVCW plant — 24/7, 365 days a year.

SVCW’s RESCU program has already replaced a pipeline that conveys sewage from the Redwood City and West Bay pump stations toward the treatment plant. The fifty-year-old, 48-inch force main had been experiencing about two leaks a year – definitely problematic in a national wildlife refuge. Another $100 million project will replace or upgrade the pump stations. (Belmont and San Carlos each have one as well.)

New facilities in front of the Radio Road plant will allow for better filtration of debris from arriving wastewater. A receiving lift station will bring it from a new gravity pipeline that will be built in a tunnel from the Holly Street/Skyway Road area underneath Redwood Shores Parkway to the plant. Last month, a massive tunnel-boring machine arrived from Germany and will be at work for two years boring out a 16-foot-wide excavation about 20 to 60 feet below ground level. The TBM will install precast concrete segments for the gravity pipeline as the machine advances.

Previously, SVCW had been considering conventional open-cut work, which would have both disrupted life at Redwood Shores but also entailed costly work-window and other limitations.

Mike Jaeger is a principal/founder of the engineering consulting firm Tanner Pacific Inc., which is overseeing RESCU’s design-builder. What changed everything, he says, was the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s Bay Tunnel Hetch Hetchy water system project, which involved tunneling through notoriously difficult bay mud. So-called “young bay mud” is like Jell-O pudding, Jaeger explains, and “you have to go below that to a denser clay, which tends to squeeze. It can grab onto your machine. It’s not easy material to break down into smaller pieces.” But the SFPUC project proved that tunneling through the more dense material could be done over a long distance.

Jaeger has utmost confidence in the design of the German-engineered machine, as well as the track record for TBMs: “There’s been probably millions of miles of tunnel built around the world, and we expect a successful completion of our project.” Called “Salus,” the TBM will be passing under Redwood Shores Parkway and “we don’t expect that anybody will notice a thing,” says Herrera.

She maintains that the project will be done as efficiently and as inexpensively as possible. Only the third manager in SVCW’s history, Herrera says not keeping up with preventative maintenance is part of the reason for the large rate increases over a short time. “This period of time for SVCW is an anomaly but everybody throughout the nation is facing this. And the more you stick your head in the sand, the more expensive it’s going to be.” Close to home, a similar project is planned in San Mateo and Foster City.

That said, all the waste that flows through the plant is definitely not going to waste. Energy is a high-cost item, but the treatment process itself generates gas (primarily methane). Not only does SVCW cover about 75 percent of its own electrical use, at a net savings of about $1.2 million a year, the agency plans a joint venture with South Bay Waste Management to feed organic, black bin garbage into SVCW digesters. Potentially, SVCW could produce “well over 100 percent” of its own energy needs from the recycled waste, Herrera says. “We’ll have excess gas.”

For years, Redwood City has been using recycled water that has received additional filtration for irrigation of city-owned land but expanded the service in 2007 to make it available to businesses and residents for non-potable uses.  The city distributed 232 million gallons in 2018.

From the treatment process, SVCW also recovers biosolids that has uses such as for landfill cover and composting. A small portion goes on for further drying at a small enterprise called Bioforcetech Corp.  It was started about six years ago by some young Italians who had just finished university training and came to SVCW with their idea for how to dry biosolids an extremely low energy use. They received the first permit in the United States to transform biosolids into energy and a product called biochar, which they are also selling.

No one has been around the Redwood Shores plant longer than consultant Joe Covello, 77, who arrived in 1978 when excavation had just started and the project was in trouble. Engineers worked night and day on a redesign, he says, but got the plant built and running. It came in at over $50 million. Covello still calls the place “SBSA.”

“I was here on the ground floor. They built the San Carlos pump station while I was here,” he says.  “It didn’t exist.” For a construction person, Covello adds, there’s nothing more rewarding than being a part of building something important and working with others to solve interesting problems.

“When I started working here, I never thought I was going to spend the next years probably doing 50 to 70 percent, if not more, of my work in wastewater,” he says. “… A lot of people turn their noses up at it because they think it’s invisible. You know, like it just happens.”

Out of sight. Out of mind.

This story was originally published in the August print edition of Climate Magazine.

A bust at a Redwood City motel Wednesday led to the seizure of an “enormous amount of property” belonging to residents throughout the Peninsula, as well as the arrest of two suspects, according to the San Mate County Sheriff’s Office.

Kirk Vernell Moore, 51, of East Palo Alto, and Veronica Machado, 28, of Daly City, were arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges including mail and identity theft following a bust at the Garden Motel, 1690 Broadway St., at about 4 p.m., the sheriff’s office reported.

While investigating a petty theft case in San Carlos on Wednesday, detectives learned the suspects were staying at the Garden Motel. The detectives went to the hotel and contacted Moore and Machado at a room they rented, and during that encounter they reported locating a credit card skimmer used to make fraudulent credit cards, numerous pieces of stolen mail, checks, and property from victims in the Emerald Lakes area of San Carlos and other Peninsula areas. A replica firearm that was illegally colored to look like a real firearm was also uncovered, the detectives said.

“Due to the enormous amount of property seized, the investigation is still ongoing and the victims will be contacted as the case progresses,” the sheriff’s office said.

Anyone with information on this case or the suspects is asked to contact Detective Dan Chiu 650-363-4057 or dchiu@smcgov.org or Detective Scott Benitez 650-363-4067 / sbenitez@smcgov.org.

Community block parties are set to happen countywide on Tuesday, Aug. 6, as part of National Night Out, an event where neighborhoods host fun gatherings inviting law enforcement, with the aim of building community and emboldening crime prevention.

Communities throughout the nation take part, including Redwood City, where 10 National Night Out parties will take place from about 5 p.m. to about 8 p.m. See the list of participating locations below.

Also, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office is partnering with Millbrae police to hold a National Night out at Central Park in Millbrae, starting at 6 p.m. The annual event will feature carnival style games, fun activities, and free refreshments.

In San Mateo, a free event will be held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, 725 Monte Diablo Ave. and will feature fun activities for kids, a BBQ and resources.

National Night Out events are held throughout the county, including in East Palo Alto (link to events here) Half Moon Bay, Pacifica, Daly City.

Redwood City National Night Out events 2019:

Photo above credited to City of Redwood City

A Cupertino planning commissioner is embroiled in controversy over allegations involving his online behavior, including 15 year old accusations that he sent pornographic images to a former Redwood City councilmember.

Last month, the City of Cupertino received a complaint about its Planning Commission chair, R “Ray” Wang. Amid a dispute with a Sunnyvale resident over a development in Cupertino, Wang reportedly identified that resident’s employer on social media and implied an intention to contact the employer with negative information, a version of doxing. Wang also reportedly encouraged the public to contact the employers of so-called YIMBYs, short for Yes In My Back Yard, with a similar aim.

Reports about those allegations prompted a reaction from former longtime Redwood City Councilmember Rosanne Foust. In an interview with San Jose Spotlight published today, Foust recalled suing Chairman Wang in 2003 for sexual harassment in a case she believed was also an attempt to tarnish the reputation of someone with a different political view.

Foust, the current executive director for the San Mateo County Economic Development Association who served as a Redwood City councilmember from 2003 to 2015, alleged in the lawsuit that Wang arranged to have sexually explicit images sent to her business email from pornographic websites. Foust believes Wang, who lived in Redwood Shores at the time, had been trying to hurt her reputation as she was planning to run for a council seat, according to Spotlight.

The suit ended in a settlement.

Wang has denied sending her the images, claiming his computer was hacked, Spotlight said.

Spotlight also uncovered via county records that Wang served community service in 2004 after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge for “making annoying telephone call to place of work” in 2003, although it’s not clear who received the calls.

Wang “should not be in any position of authority, period,” Foust told the news publication.

“I think as women we do tend to want to just put it behind us, bury it, to say, ‘Okay, you know what? Move on.’” Foust reportedly stated. “But I was really mad when I saw that he was trying to hurt somebody else.”

Read Spotlight’s detailed report on the controversy here.

This is a masticator, and it’s going to play a big role in ensuring San Mateo County residents are protected in the event of wildfires.

On Thursday, the San Mateo County Parks and Recreation Commission is set to hear a presentation on plans to mitigate fire risks in county parks.

The Parks Department, which maintains about 37.5 miles of fire roads within its system, has two main strategies for mitigating wildfire risks: managing vegetation, and maintaining all-weather fire roads that provide access for first responders and evacuation routes for the public. Over $1.3 million in the department’s 2019-20 budget is dedicated for fire fuel reduction and preparedness efforts, the county said.

Soon, the masticator will help in this effort.

The Parks Department purchased the new tool that clears vegetation mechanically instead of by hand, reducing project timelines by half, the county said. The Department will begin training rangers on how to use the machine safely and effectively starting in fall this year.

“The program will allow the Department to better manage fire fuels within the parks long-term and year-round,” the county said.

Meanwhile, significant projects to clear highly combustible vegetation in order to prevent the spread of wildfires are set to begin next month.

Earlier this year, Gov. Newsom asked Cal Fire to assemble a list of California communities at greatest risk of catastrophic fires, and to dedicate state funding toward reducing risk through projects such as vegetation management. Two of the 35 projects deemed as high-priority exist in San Mateo County, with Kings Mountain Road being No. 2 no the list, and Quarry Park No. 16.

Both projects, which aim to clear highly combustible vegetation near park fire roads and roads, are anticipated to commence in mid-August.

On Kings Mountain Road, Cal Fire and the County of San Mateo Parks Department plan to create about “70 acres of shaded fuel breaks in Huddart Park,” with contractors set to remove all trees under 10 inches in diameter, larger dead and dying trees and ground vegetation within 200 feet of each side of Kings Mountain Road, according to city documents.

Similarly at Quarry Park, about 100 acres of shaded fuel breaks will be created throughout the park, but within 100 feet of designated fire roads and roads.

Strategically removing highly combustible vegetation can prevent fires from starting and spreading, county officials said.

Mark Muenzer has been appointed as Redwood City’s new community development and transportation director following the departure of Aaron Aknin in February, which prompted a national executive search.

Muenzer’s appointment begins Aug. 19. He was described by Redwood City officials as a highly experienced innovator who formerly served as community development director in Menlo Park, overseeing the city’s planning, building, housing and economic development divisions. In Menlo Park, he managed department staff in processing significant mixed-use development projects including an 8-acre Stanford University mixed-use project, and the proposed 60-acre Facebook Willow Village.

Prior to his work in Menlo Park, he served as a department head for the City of Evanston, Ill., managing planning, housing, building/inspection, and city transportation. His reorganization of the department led to record building permit revenue, improved project review processes and implementations of an inclusionary housing ordinance and transit-oriented development projects, according to a statement by Redwood City.

Muenzer also served as Evanston’s first LGBT Liaison connecting city government to the community’s LGBT residents.

“Mark has an outstanding reputation as an urban planning professional and leader,” said Melissa Stevenson Diaz, city manager of Redwood City. “Mark has broad experience with complex projects, and a creative and visionary mindset. His demonstrated ability to bring together stakeholders with diverse interests will be an asset for Redwood City.”

Muenzer said he is “thrilled” to join Redwood City.

“The City of Redwood City has a progressive reputation where it values collaboration with a diverse community,” he said in a statement. “I look forward to leading a team of professional staff to serve the community and further the City’s mission.”

Muenzer, who lives in downtown San Jose, has also held management roles in Chicago’s planning department, as well as for the City of Countryside, Ill. and as contract services manager for the Hamilton County Development Company, Inc.

He holds a Master of Community Planning from the University of Cincinnati, with a concentration in economic development planning, and a Bachelor of Arts, Political Science from Gannon University, with a concentration in business administration, according to the city of Redwood City.