Horde of the flies

Jamee Mendonca’s backyard is often uninhabitable before the sun dips in the evening and it cools down at her home on Chico River Road. It’s at its worst between 5 and 6 p.m., when she and her husband, Justin, like to barbecue and their two daughters want to play basketball in the driveway.

It’s the flies. They never really go away. In the morning they’re an inconvenience the family can swat away, but with the heat they appear in life-disrupting numbers, swarming over screen doors, vehicles and even the family’s dog, a yellow Lab named Cash.

“They bite him until he bleeds,” Mendonca said.

The Mendoncas live on 10 acres of almond and walnut orchards, property that’s been in the family since the 1930s. Those orchards buffer their home from the Water Pollution Control Plant, where all of Chico’s sewage ends up. The liquids are treated and fed into the Sacramento River. The solids, though, have to dry out before being trucked to the Neal Road landfill. That means “biosolids”—i.e., human feces—sit outside the plant for days at a time, which attracts flies. Lots of flies.

Over the years, the plant generally has been a good neighbor, Mendonca says. The family catches a nasty whiff on the breeze “only very rarely.” When the flies become unbearable, she’ll notify the plant manager, who may increase the frequency of spraying insecticide on the piles of solid waste.

What really has Mendonca worked up is a well-publicized proposal to build an 8-mile pipe along the Skyway that would send Paradise’s sewage to the Chico plant for treatment. She has doubts about the city taking on more waste at a facility that, based on her family’s experiences, struggles to move the solid stuff off-site in a timely manner.

“I’m realistic about it,” she said. “I know the plant isn’t going anywhere. I just want them to have a plan and manage what they have. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

Paradise Vice Mayor Jody Jones floated the pipeline proposal during the Chico City Council meeting on Sept. 1. She described the decaying septic systems in her town’s commercial core and touted potential benefits for Chico, such as increased revenue through hook-up fees and selling the extra treated water to irrigation districts downstream.

As Jones told the council, Paradise is the “largest incorporated city west of the Mississippi River still wholly dependent on septic systems.” And they’re deteriorating, especially in the town’s commercial core—27 septic systems already have failed, 39 are expected to fail in five years, and 56 more likely will fail within 10 years, Jones said. (The issue likely will come back before the Chico City Council in November, she said in an email.)

The aging systems pose a potential threat to groundwater and also the local economy if businesses aren’t able to expand or are discouraged from opening in the first place, Jones told the council. “If one area suffers an economic decline, it can pull down the entire region.”

Rather than Paradise building its own treatment plant or smaller clustered systems in commercial areas, the preferred solution—at least for the Paradise Town Council—is building the pipeline.

The idea has been kicked around for years, but whether it’s feasible and environmentally sound remain open questions, said Erik Gustafson, Chico’s acting director of Public Works. He says that the project “really needs to be analyzed further.”

For one, it’s not easy digging along the Skyway, and burying an 8-mile pipeline surely would pose challenges. Hooking up to the sewer collection system—the series of pipes that takes water from residences and businesses to the treatment plant—is another problem, Gustafson said.

“Could the collection system handle the additional flow? Right now, the answer is yes, but it would limit the residential growth” in the area nearest to the connection, he said. “It would likely mean improvements to underground infrastructure.”

The treatment plant itself could handle the load, he said. It has the capacity to treat 12 million gallons per day, but operates at about half that, and he says there’s room, both in terms of physical space and potential improvements to infrastructure, to expand capacity to 15 million gallons per day.

As for Mendonca’s specific concerns, Gustafson said he’s heard them loud and clear.

“It’s a wastewater treatment facility, so absolutely, yes, there will be flies,” he said. “But we do everything we can to try to control the fly issue out there.”

The city contracts with a pest control company to spray the solid waste about once a week, and they’ve recognized that “the more you move and turn the biosolids, the more flies you’re going to attract.” By cutting back on that during the drying process, he says, staff noticed fewer flies around the plant over the summer.

Removing biosolids more quickly is a possible way to limit the number of flies, Gustafson said. The city is looking at entering into a contract with a hauler to move most of the solid waste without drying it first, an agreement that could begin within the next few months.

“I absolutely understand Jamee’s concerns,” Gustafson said. “We want to be good neighbors and help with any fly issues she has at her home. Hopefully there’s a solution on the horizon.”

In the meantime, Mendonca hopes the city and its residents carefully consider all of the ramifications of the proposed Paradise pipeline, which she believes the media has painted as a win-win. She personally doesn’t have much of a voice as a county resident, albeit one directly affected by operations of the city.

“I’m not a Chico resident, but I’m having to deal with the city’s flies,” she said. “It’s the city’s poop.”