production facilities.

Dierker said some industries spent millions of dollars cleaning up pollution under this voluntary policy.

But in May, 1968, the board's inspectors visited Johns-Manville for the first time and found 1.04 million gallons per day of untreated waste pouring into the deadend lagoon of New York Slough on the south side of Suisun Bay.

This is a spot where tidal fluctuations during winter and spring can easily carry cignificant amounts of this pollution into the drinking water intake pumps of both the city of Antioch and the Contra Costa County Water District.

The board report said the Johns-Manville discharge consisted of the toilet Aushings of 300 workers "mixed with industrial waste from the manufacturing of tar paper, asphaltic and asbestos roofing and asbestoscement building products."

Company officials did not appear at a public hearing to discuss the problem. The regional board then ordered stiff regulations for the company's plant and asked the staff to draft some more.

Johns-Manville national officials were stunned by the resulting publicity and promptly flew top management officials to California to issue a public apology.

The company is still discharging raw waste into the Bay, but the plant will be hooked up to the Pittsburg city sewer system by May. This has required redesigning Pittsburg's sewage facilities.

The regional board's policies toward industry differ with each plant. Situations which would be considered intolerable in the stagnant waters of South San Francisco Bay might be acceptable in North Bay areas which have a strong natural tidal "flushing action."

Tidal flushing in the south Bay (generally south of Bay Farm Island and Hunters Point) is so poor that Army Engineers tests show that only one-millionth of the sewage discharged at Redwood City gets flushed out of the Golden Gate by tidal action in a measurable length of time.

The Army tests on the Bay model at Sausalito shows pollution dumped into the South Bay simply flows up into all of the tidal sloughs and sits there.

San Jose's ultra-modern new $32 million treatment plant, which serves 750,000 people, has improved the South Bay situation since 1964, but even the San Jose plant can't meet the desired South Bay water quality

standards.

San Jose, and other South Bay cities, are now considering constructing a 35-mile-long sewer pipe up the Bay from Alviso to the vicinity of Treasure Island so that San Jose's already highly treated sewage can discharge

where tidal currents will carry it to the ocean.

The situation in the North Bay is different. Dierker said the city of Vallejo uses only low-grade "primary" sewage treatment, but its discharge into the fast moving currents of Carquinez Strait is adequate to disperse the waste.

The last of the "self-regulating" industries brought under regional board control was the California and Hawaiian Sugar Co. at Crockett, which sends its sewage to a municipal treatment plant but also discharges 45.2 million gallons of industrial waste per day into Carquinez Strait from 21 outfalls.

The board's policy statement about C&H, drafted by Dick Russell and H. C. Knapp, of the board's staff, said 96 per cent of the discharge is cooling water.

The report said the remaining flow consists of sodium carbonate cleaning chemicals, burned sugar, raw sugar and the washings of sugar-processing machinery, battery acid, sulfamic acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, etc.

This would be a bad combination in most areas of the Bay-particularly the sugar discharge, which burns up oxygen in the water, kills fish and can turn salt water black.

Sugar in cannery waste at San Jose is the major source of water pollution in the South Bay.

But, Russell explained, "The flow of water at Carquinez Strait is tremendous and the C&H discharge isn't really a problem." In engineering terms, he said, "pollution is a function of volume" and at the C&H plant the volume of good water is tremendous.

There is widespread evidence that industry is willing to spend considerable amounts of money to clean up pollution, but in most cases the actual figures aren't available as a matter of public record.

Ronald James, mayor of San Jose, recently told a pollution control meeting "A few years ago the local managers of national corporations wouldn't give us the time of day when we talked about pollution.

"We have some bad stuff flowing into San Jose's sewers, including sugar and various cannery wastes, acids and chemicals from electronics manufacturing and other things that are difficult for a treatment plant to handle.

"But recently, the local plant managers have been told by national firms that they're supposed to cooperate. In most cases we're getting good cooperation.

San Jose enacted a sewer tax surcharge under which industries with difficult-to-treat sewage are charged at a higher rate. This has resulted in considerable experimentation in "pre-treatment" to clean up waste before it goes into the sewers.

East Bay Municipal Utility District is considering the same sort of surtax for hard

to-treat sewage in Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, Berkeley, Piedmont, Albany, El Cerrito and Kensington.

However, in San Francisco, where the worst kind of raw, untreated industrial pollution pours out from overflowing sewer lines every time it rains, the county board of supervisors is on record as opposed to any kind of sewer tax, sewer surtax or sewer connection fee.

When asked what the possibility of using such taxes to clean up the San Francisco mess, San Francisco Supervisor Robert Mendelsohn, chairman of the health committee, told the regional board, "We aren't even considering anything like that."

The Islais Creek Sewer Treatment Plants, which discharge the toilets of 161,000 persons, plus the south-of-Market industrial area, into a dead-end lagoon one block from the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, doesn't even chlorinate the sewage.

The regional board's report on San Francisco County found 660,000 gallons per day of untreated waste, mostly in the industrial [p. 9048] district, discharging into the Bay because pipes hadn't been hooked up to flow into the sewer treatment plants.

Under board orders the city shut down a dozen individual company raw sewage discharges and agreed to tie the South Fourth Street industrial area sewer pipes into the municipal collection system.

At the San Francisco Port Authority docks the regional board investigators found 207,000 gallons of raw sewage per day flushing directly into the Bay from 405 toilets, 243 wash basins and 180 urinals.

The city has launched a program of connecting San Francisco Port Authority toilets to the municipal sewer system although some officials consider this a futile effort because of the flows of raw sewage pouring out under the docks from the rest of the city sewer system.

The regional board report concluded: "The city and county of San Francisco has the ambivalent role of being the greatest waste discharger while requiring the greatest protection of Bay waters along her shore for beneficial uses.'

There are some kinds of pollution which are extremely visible in the Bay but are considered harmless to wildlife and are therefore at the bottom of the board's priority list.

Dierker said these include the reddish tint seen in the water near the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza, which he said is iron oxide from an Emeryville paint plant. A white tinge can be seen near a South San Francisco milk of magnesia factory.

Dierker said a "very significant" effort is being made by a committee of industries to clean up pollution in the North Richmond

area in the cove east of Point San Pablo.

During the past four years the dischargers spent $5,145,000 on new pollution control equipment and worked on a major long range plan to eliminate pollution to this cove.

A report issued by the industrial committee listed spending in four years as: Allied Chemical Corp., $90,000; Chevron Chemical Co., $1,632,000; San Pablo Sanitary District, $236,000, and Standard Oil Co. of California, $3,187,000.

On Jan. 15, the regional board adopted a policy, agreed to by the dischargers, under which dischargers promised to work toward the "maximum feasible degree" of treatment in North Richmond.

Dierker said. "This means tertiary treatment (very pure) discharges. The companies and the sewer district might elect to use a lower degree of treatment and discharge it far out into the Bay through a long pipe, but in that case they'd have to come back to the board to ask for a lowering of standards." This program might turn North Richmond into one of the most beautiful spots along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay.

SAN FRANCISCO REALLY HAS A SEWER PLANBUT JUST WHAT IS IT?

(By Fred Garretson)

San Francisco city officials talk boldly, but not too confidently, about Mayor Joseph Alioto's master plan to clean up the San Francisco sewer mess.

After 20 years of playing hide-and-seek with the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board, San Francisco's supervisors caved in to strong pressure from the U.S. Interior Department and on Oct. 28 passed a resolution agreeing to obey state pollution control laws.

On Nov. 13 Alioto signed the official "policy of intent to adhere to a schedule for compliance with waste discharge requirements" established by the pollution control board.

At the same time Alioto let it be known that San Francisco wouldn't be able to ineet the time schedule unless the state and federal governments put up most of the money to buy pollution control facilities which the other 90 cities in the Bay Area have taxed themselves to pay for.

Nonetheless, Alioto and other San Francisco officials have been able to say, "We are proceeding with a plan . . .”

But there is considerable confusion among San Francisco's top officials about just what that plan is:

Mayor Alioto says it's a $300 million plan to build a great sewer discharge pipe stretching miles out into the ocean. He tells reporters, "See Tom Mellon for the details."

Chief Administrative Officer Tom Mellon says it's a $600 to $800 million plan to build huge "sewage caverns" in the San Francisco

hills and to construct many small treatment plants along the shoreline. He tells reporters to "See Myron Tatarian for details."

Public Works Director S. Myron Tatarian says it's a $135 million plan to extend three city sewer treatment plant outfalls a few thousand feet out into the Bay and to "do something" about the great streams of human excrement which now cascade across the public beaches in the western part of the city after every little rainstorm.

Tatarian doesn't pass the buck to anyone, but he refers a lot of questions to City Engineer Robert C. Levy, who said the city is considering a whole galaxy of plans including sewage caverns, mini-treatment plants, shoreline sewage holding ponds, and, if worst comes to worst, maybe a big pipe out into the ocean.

San Francisco's fundamental problem is an antique design which combines sewage and storm water runoff in a single pipe system which, in dry weather, delivers sewage to three treatment plants, but which in wet weather overflows raw sewage through 41 bypass pipes along the city shoreline.

Tatarian said the plan adopted by the Board of Supervisors is:

1. By 1975 the city's average daily dry weather flow of 99 million gallons of partly treated sewage will be discharged in deep water tidal channels instead of spilling out close to shore in brown waves under the docks near Fisherman's Wharf, in a deadend creek near the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market and directly onto the sands of Mile Rock Beach near Lands End.

2. By 1981. if all goes well, 12 of the city's 41 wet weather sewer discharge pipes along the ocean beaches and near Aquatic Park and the Marina will be fixed so that human excrement will no longer be dumped onto the public beaches.

No provisions were made to fix up the other 29 sewer outfalls along the Bay shoreline south of Pier 45 (Fisherman's Wharf). This area includes not only the largest sewers, but the heaviest population densities in San Francisco.

San Francisco is divided into three "sewer watershed" zones whose resident populations are: Richmond-Sunset, 170.000; Southeast (the industrial district), 161,000; North Point (including all of downtown) 409,000.

By 1981, if the city can meet the official timetable, all of Richmond-Sunset's wet weather discharges, plus four of the 20 North Point Sewers (Baker, Pierce. Laguna and Hyde Streets) will be fixed. No one knows for certain, but these four sewers apparently serve about 60,000 persons.

This means that the toilet flushings of the entire Southeast Zone, plus 350,000 residents of the North Point Zone will continue to pour untreated into the Bay during wet

weather.

The current boom in skyscraper office and apartment houses will increase the number of toilets in this zone.

A 1965 survey by the Northern California Transit Demonstration Project showed 890,299 daily trips in and out of San Francisco Central Business District between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays.

This figure can be subjected to wide interpretation because visitors contribute to the sewers through toilets, restaurant dishwashing and garbage disposal machines.

City planning department officials said this particular study counted commuting workers only once, but downtown shoppers twice and also included some of the through traffic rom the Bay Bridge that bypassed downtown San Francisco. The figure doesn't include evening visitors to San Francisco.

But by conservative estimates the gure could be translated into 450,000 visitors depositing into the sewer system.

This means that in the North Point and Southeast Sewer Zones the raw sewage of almost one million people will continue to get dumped into the Bay untreated every time it rains.

The timetable adopted by the Board of Supervisors and proclaimed as official policy by Mayor Alioto, makes no provision for these 29 sewers except to say that the problem will be considered "as the need arises," if and when water contact sports facilities are built along the waterfront.

Tatarian says this means that individual sewers will be diverted if the city decides to build a marina or swimming facility at a spot where a sewer now discharges.

And Tartarian stresses, the multi-million cost of fixing the sewers will be computed part of the cost of the recreation development.

as

This runs exactly opposite to the policies of the regional water pollution control agency, which aims to make all parts of the Bay safe for swimming.

Levy said reconstructing the entire San Francisco sewer system to modern standards by putting in separate sanitary and storm drainage pipes would cost $1.4 billion.

He said it would require digging up every street in the city, and rebuilding the plumbing of every building to separate the sanitary pipes from the roof rain drains.

Half of the cost would be public money. The other half would be borne by private property owners, who would have to pay an estimated $2.000 per dwelling unit to make the conversion, Levy said.

"There wouldn't be any money available for other civic projects," he said.

Tatarian and Levy said various types of construction could solve a major part of the sewer overflow problem-mainly sewage re

tention basins-and might bring San Francisco into conformity with water quality control board standards.

They said extending dry weather outfalls into the Bay and making internal treatment plant improvements would cost $35 million.

Fixing the wet weather outfalls on ocean beaches and near the Marina District would cost $45 million. Fixing the other 29 wet weather sewer outfalls would cost $55 million. However, Levy stressed, these are 1968 dollar figures which don't include bond interest costs, inflation or rising land and construction costs, which they said are increasing five percent per year.

Levy said these cost figures are optimistic estimates based on tentative conclusions by consultants working on an experimental design for a miniature wet-weather treatment plant that might meet water pollution standards.

This pilot plant is proposed for the Baker Street Sewer outfall next to St. Francis Yacht Club.

The success or failure of this experiment will affect all future planning to clean up the San Francisco sewer problem.

Mr. REID of New York. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 4148, the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1969.

This measure contains several important safeguards to preserve the remaining purity of this Nation's water

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sources and to insure that they will be free of the pollution that results from a number of major activities.

In particular, the bill provides strict controls on oil pollution and establishes the liability of the owner of the facility responsible for the oil leak for cleaning up the water and surrounding beaches. I believe that the civil and criminal penalties in this section of the bill for failure to comply with these requirements are fair and necessary in light of the several recent tragic oil leaks.

There is another aspect of this legislation which I would like to emphasize briefly. That is section 11(b) which requires that any applicant for a Federal license for an activity that may discharge waste into the navigable waters of the United States present the issu

ing agency with certification from the affected States that the activity will be conducted in such a manner that it will not reduce the quality of the water below the State's accepted standards. This provision is specifically intended Energy to require that the Atomic Commission take thermal pollution into consideration when issuing licenses for nuclear generating facilities.

This section was included in the bill over the objections of the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who sought to weaken it in several particulars. I applaud the firm stand of the Public Works Committee in insisting on these sensible precautions so that the thermal standards for water quality adopted by 34 of the Nation's water quality jurisdictions will not be meaningless in the eyes of the AEC.

In my judgment, we must give much more study to the deleterious effects of thermal pollution. While many States have made progress in adopting thermal standards for water quality, there are indications that some of those standards are inadequate. I feel that we should effect a moratorium in the construction of nuclear powerplants until we can be sure not only that the plants present no radiological hazards, but also that they will not reduce the quality of surrounding waters or upset the ecological balance in the area. There has been some indication that the coolant towers associated with nuclear plants can be a source of enormous air pollution, and even cause weather modification in some instances. While these aspects of power production are not of immediate concern in connection with this legislation, my colleagues may wish to bear them in mind for future discussions regarding air pollution, nuclear plants, and the quality of our environment. To further befoul our air and water and retard their purification in the name of advancing technology would be folly.

It is my understanding that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. VANIK) will propose an amendment to this bill, to

incorporate the features of H.R. 9832, of which I am a cosponsor. Mr. VANIK'S amendment would provide an emergency fund to provide permanent corrective relief for those areas of the Nation which are in environmental crises. Included among those "pollution disaster" areas are the Lake Erie basin, the great rivers, and other offshore regions. The problems in these areas are international, interstate, and of such magnitude that their solution is beyond the capacity of any single State. I urge my colleagues to support Mr. VANIK'S amendment, in order that these areas may receive the urgent attention which they need.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, while I commend the committee's comprehensive approach to the problem of water pollution, I feel that the appropriations authorized by this legislation are totally inadequate. It has been estimated that, to restore this Nation's waters to their natural state and keep them that way, we would need to spend $100 billion between now and the end of the century. This bill would authorize appropriations of only $348 million during the next 3 fiscal years. I hope that my colleagues will provide full funding for this legislation, will increase the funds for water pollution control in future years, and provide funds for sewage treatment in an additional bill. There is a critical need for legislation providing for the treatment of solid wastes.

Mr. WOLFF. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to join in support of the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1969 which promises to be another major step forward in our effort to curb water pollution and protect our environment for future generations.

There is a special pleasure in supporting this bill because section 18 contains provisions I had previously introduced as separate legislation to control sewage from vessels. I am, of course, gratified to see my long-standing recommendation included as part of this omnibus legislation.

It is essential that this legislation receive our prompt affirmative action. Every day our waterways are being polluted by waste from vessels, industrial spillage, oil slicks, and other pollutants that collectively threaten to permanently destroy our e.vironment. I have long felt this is an area, along with air pollution, deserving the highest priorities of the Federal Government. It is therefore reassuring that this legislation is among the first major bills to come before the House this year. I trust we will pass this bill without delay and declare ourselves firmly in favor of necessary controls on the menace of water pollution.

As has been noted in debate the major provisions of this legislation are designed as a greatly needed assault on the problem of pollution from offshore oil drilling and oil leaking from tankers. This problem has increased sharply in recent years and reached its unfortunate zenith in January and February when the beaches of southern California were turned into filthy, blackened sponges full of oil. A repetition of this tragedy, which killed fish and wildfowl besides ruining recreational and natural resources for human enjoyment, cannot be tolerated and I am hopeful this bill would begin to solves this problem.

I am also impressed by those provisions of the bill requiring assurances that industries and utllities discharging wastes into waterways provide necessary assurances that the waste will not violate existing guidelines on pollution. This is a constructive step in the effort to curb the still unmeasurable impact of thermal pollution.

As I noted at the outset I am pleased that the bill contains provisions I had sponsored previously to control the sewage from vessels. As pleasure boating and commercial use of the waterways are growing we must have the necessary protections to ward off still another threat to our rivers, harbors, and shoreline.

This is a good bill that takes a giant