L.A. County sewage threatens Tulare Lake floodwaters

KETTLEMAN CITY, Calif. —

Here at the western edge of the Tulare Lake Basin dwells a smelly industrial site the size of 150 football fields. Roughly eight times a day, its operations are replenished with a truckload of human waste from the residents of Los Angeles County.

Since 2016, the Tulare Lake Compost facility has been converting Southland sewage sludge into high-grade organic fertilizer, and sparing L.A. County the bother of burying its waste in local landfills.

But as epic Sierra Nevada snowpack threatens to overwhelm this phantom lake bed with spring runoff — inundating a region that has already suffered flooding from a series of powerful storms — some fear the facility could be transformed into an environmental disaster.

“When the southwest corner of Tulare Lake floods, thousands of tons of L.A. County sewage sludge, containing toxic heavy metals, will become part of the mix in the newly formed lake,” said Tom Frantz, a retired schoolteacher and environmental activist who once lived in the area but moved to San Luis Obispo three years ago.

“You can’t grow food for humans where this waste has been spread,” Frantz said.

Area water managers and government officials acknowledge that if Tulare Lake Compost were flooded, the resulting contamination could trickle into groundwater and contaminate streams and rivers throughout the region. An even bigger risk comes from scores of waste lagoons at nearby chicken and dairy ranches that dot the valley floor.

It’s for this reason that officials are now keeping a wary eye on levees and other structures that are designed to keep floodwaters from entering waste ponds.

“We have seen it already driving around Tulare in the last few weeks,” said Angel Fernandez-Bou, a researcher with UC Merced’s Environmental Systems Graduate Group and a Western states senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Intensive cattle operations that are not careful about their waste had that waste spread beyond their properties, with nearby puddles of black water because of the waste,” he said.

“If floodwaters carrying cow waste arrive near vulnerable communities, it is very possible that domestic wells are contaminated with such pathogens as E. coli. That can make water immediately toxic unless their water system has a disinfection treatment,” he said.

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