Harmful blooms spur more wastewater upgrades
Palo Alto’s bioreactor towers are aging out, like a lot of the clean water infrastructure constructed around the Bay Area in the 1950s-1970s. Recent wind gusts, swirling around the edges of February’s atmospheric river storms, have not been friendly to the towers either. On a March visit to the Palo Alto Regional Water Quality Control Plant, which treats 18 million gallons of wastewater every day, I could see a big chunk missing from the wall of one rusty cauldron and tumbleweeds caught in the metalwork. Elsewhere on the 25-acre site, the plant’s facilities are visibly undergoing a $193 million overhaul. The overhaul will help the plant meet increasing regulatory limits on the amount of nitrogen that dischargers can pipe into the shallows of San Francisco Bay.