Coronavirus: Worker at San Jose wastewater plant tests positive; 17 quarantined

Highlighting the threat that coronavirus poses to basic public health systems around California and the nation, a worker at San Jose’s wastewater treatment plant — a facility that treats the sewage from 1.5 million people in San Jose and seven other cities — has tested positive for COVID-19.

The employee is a janitor working as part of a contract company. The massive plant, located in Alviso, has 17 employees in self-quarantine as a result and is running at about 70% staffing.

“The staff is continuing with business as usual, although at a lower head count,” said Kerrie Romanow, director of environmental services for the city of San Jose. “We are continuing to treat wastewater.”

Romanow said Monday that plant operators — employees who have state licenses and who run pumps, filters, chlorination equipment and other systems to treat 100 million gallons of wastewater a day before releasing it into San Francisco Bay — are working in shifts so that they aren’t all together at the same place and time.

“It put a scare in everybody,” said one city employee familiar with the plant operations. “Several people decided they would self quarantine, which was advisable. And we came up with plans of how to do minimum staffing.”

Wastewater plants around the bay have been in regular contact with each other, checking to see if they can provide help to fill gaps from coronavirus problems.

San Jose also is in discussion with some retirees to come back to assist, and has brought in at least one licensed worker from a private company and another from San Jose’s municipal water department as a backup. No other employees at the wastewater plant have tested positive.

“As long as we don’t all get sick and there’s no catastrophic equipment failure, we’re holding the fort down,” Romanow said.

There are more than 40 sewage treatment plants around San Francisco Bay. Built at a cost of billions of dollars over generations, they take the wastewater from the toilets, showers, sinks and other sources of 7 million residents, disinfect and filter it, and release millions of gallons every hour into San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

So far, state officials who oversee those plants say they are unaware of workers in other Bay Area sewage treatment facilities who have been sidelined with COVID-19.

“The wastewater agencies are doing very well so far. Crossing my fingers that it stays that way,” said Newsha Ajami, a Stanford University research engineer and member of the the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board, which regulates wastewater plants. “But no one knows where this is going. It eventually could impact the health of the bay.”

So far, no cases have been detected at the wastewater plant in Oakland run by the East Bay Municipal Utilities District.

In a worst case scenario, Romanow and Ajami said, if COVID-19 became more rampant across the Bay Area and triggered shortages of wastewater treatment plant operators, it’s unlikely that sewage would back up into homes and businesses. That’s because many systems, like San Jose’s, are gravity fed, where the sewage moves toward the plant without needing to be pumped. Rather, it would be treated to lower standards, or perhaps not at all and released into San Francisco Bay.

Until the 1960s, when state laws and then the federal Clean Water Act took effect, many cities released raw sewage or barely treated sewage into the bay. The practice killed fish, wiped out oyster beds, and caused public health problems. It also created large, stinking dead zones of sewage and rotting fruit cannery waste in the South Bay in the 1940s and 1950s, where the water is less than 10 feet deep in many places and has much less circulation than other parts of the bay that are closer to the currents of the Golden Gate.

“So many vital services and workers we usually take for granted are affected by this pandemic,” said David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, an environmental group in Oakland that has worked to clean and protect the bay since the 1960s. “It shows how investing in public health is crucial for people and the environment.”

In the San Jose incident, city officials were notified last Monday that the janitorial worker tested positive. Romanow sent an email the next day notifying the wastewater plant staff. They brought in a new cleaning company, cleaned the areas where the ill custodian had worked, and quickly investigated those who had come into contact with her or worked in the areas she cleaned.

The last day the worker was at the plant was March 11, Romanow said. That means starting Wednesday, plant workers on self-quarantine will have gone two weeks since potential exposure and should be able to begin returning to work. Those workers include licensed operators, instrument technicians and maintenance employees.

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EDD payment pace falters The plant also received a new shipment Friday of gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant, she said. Some engineers and financial analysts are working from home. Capital projects at the plant that are part of a 30-year, $2 billion modernization project have been put on hold.

The plant has been in existence since the 1950s. It treats sewage and wastewater from San Jose, Santa Clara, Campbell, Cupertino, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Monte Sereno. The facility uses tertiary sewage treatment, which removes 99% of impurities, then chlorinates the water, neutralizes the chlorine so it won’t hurt fish and wildlife, and releases it into the bay. About 13% of the wastewater is recycled and used for irrigation.

“Most of us have planned for natural disasters like earthquakes and floods,” Romanow said of the plant’s 200 employees. “What we haven’t planned for is us not being able to work together. That’s the nuance that changes all of this. Normally you all pull together, but now it’s ‘let’s stay 6 feet apart.'”

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