Here's an update on las month's horrendous San Francisco Bay sewage spill. Iinitial reports put the spill at 5.2 million gallons. It has now been discovered that the spill was in fact much larger and as much as 7.5 million gallons spilled into the Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The wastewater deposited into Calera Creek, and subsequently the ocean, contained everything from fats and oils to heavy metals and anything else flushed into the sewer system that day.

When you think of the Great Barrier Reef you think of beautiful fish, pristine ecosystems and great surfing not raw sewage. According to Bruce Gunn, a former diving guide on the reef, sewage is an increasing threat to not only marine life but human health as well! Gunn claims that while he worked as the chief engineer on a charter dive boat in the 1990s, he was fixing a pump on a sewage tank when a valve broke cutting his wrist and covering him in raw sewage. Tragically, he contracted Hepatitis C from this incident and his had failing health ever since. Gunn is now trying to shed some light on the growing problem of sewage dumping within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. "Today there are hundreds of charter boats doing two trips a week and each of them is dumping a 44-gallon drum amount of what I call cocktail sewage," he said. "I saw a mullet once with a tampon still hanging out of its mouth." That's one of the grossest things I can imagine. This is a great example of how sewage in our rivers, lakes, streams and oceans can not only cause great damage to those natural ecosystems, but poses significant human health risks with very real and devastating consequences.

And now the Spills of the Week:

Florida is under severe drought. As water becomes increasingly scarce, treated sewage has suddenly become a subject of interest. The Slog covered how Orange County, CA is considering this solution last week and Florida is also considering reuse as a solution.

I couldn't agree more with the sentiments of Mary Rawl from Friends of Billy Creek about South Florida's dirty little sewage secret. "It is a disgrace in this day and age when we have the technology to clean and treat sewage that we still dump into our waters.  And Southeast Florida, especially since it is in a severe drought, could be using this sewage as reuse water in an area where 50% of potable water is used for irrigation!"

From the Arthur R. Marshall Foundation 

The sewage versus coral reef controversy continues to rage in south Florida. In a tradition of denial that would make the tobacco industry proud, consultants paid by the south Florida sewer plants, armed with the best junk science money can buy, conduct a misinformation campaign trying to convince the public there is no connection between a half billion gallons a day of sewage pumped onto coral reefs and their decline.