Dr. Alexander Rips RWQCB: ‘Where’s the Proof?!’

Environmental scientist, civil engineer, inventor of the tilt-up building, contractor, abalone farmer, Dr. John Alexander is an international authority on a variety of water-related issues, and founder of John Alexander Research, which he formed for no other reason than to help mankind. He is included in Who’s Who In Science and Who’s Who Hall of Fame, served on President Reagan’s advisory committee, and continues to advise governmental agencies when called upon. He lives in a modest home off Highway 1, on his own sprawling promontory outside Cayucos, with a floor-to-ceiling picture window looking westerly out into the Pacific and southward over miles and miles of mostly empty beaches. Looming in the distance is Morro Rock, with Los Osos a patch of green amid the blue just beyond. Years of hands-on experience in multiple fields of endeavor has gifted Dr. Alexander with the ability and desire to develop simple, low-cost solutions to complex, seemingly cost-prohibitive water problems that confound communities here and around the world. At 88, Dr. Alexander maintains a keen interest in seeing that Los Osos gets the right information to build the right project, as he views it, and doesn’t mince words when it comes to pollution, septic tanks, nitrates, the gravity collection system and RWQCB.

    Roger Briggs and the CCRWQCB should listen to Dr. Alexander, and listen closely, because Dr. Alexander knows water, and water is what it’s all about. Dr. Alexander asks nothing in return. He doesn’t need the money or the glory. His lifetime of credentials hint at a Renaissance man driven by an unquenchable passion to provide simple answers to difficult questions, a form of truth-telling reserved only for the very wise in any culture. And he is willing to share his ideas with anyone who will listen, if only Briggs and the board could hear.
    Unfortunately, their ears are hermetically sealed from the inside, and that’s the way they like it; that’s the only way they can survive. Because once you accept Dr. Alexander as a credible witness, you are left with no other choice but to question the underpinnings of the water board’s actions against Los Osos, if not the RWQCB’s very existence. At the molten core of Dr. Alexander’s frustration is his firm belief that the RWQCB hasn’t conclusively proven that pollution exists in Los Osos, certainly not in quantities enough to force the building of the Tri-W megasewer, or the same megasewer outside of town.
    “There is some pollution (in Morro Bay), but I don’t think it’s from the septic tanks (in Los Osos), although it’s possible a little bit does,” Dr. Alexander said, acknowledging the chance but not the likelihood.
    “Some nitrates are removed in some septic tanks, but the primary release of nitrates is in the leach lines. The bulk of nitrates are removed from the water that goes through the leach lines. The soil is what removes it, and the sandy loam that they have in Los Osos is ideal for that.”
    Historically, he explains, nitrates are removed in about six feet of sandy loam soil, but adds that this does not work in saturated soil, “so there is a possibility that there could be some nitrate problem in the lower end where the water table is close to the surface, but actually there has never been a test to indicate that the individual septic tanks and leach lines are producing nitrates. Separate testing has found that most of the nitrates are taken up before they even get to the leach lines.”
    The RWQCB has it all backwards, Dr. Alexander asserts. “It’s the duty of the RWQCB to prove the case, rather than making false attempts (at testing) by putting in illegal wells and extrapolating.”
    Wells are illegal, Dr. Alexander submits, when they are drilled below a horse farm and not capped, and when the water from the farm—and urine from the horses—go directly into the wells. “And these (test results) are what the RWQCB bases everything on. They’ve made other tests, which are very inconclusive, because they don’t indicate that it’s the septic tanks at all, or leach lines on them, that are causing the problem,” he said.
    “It’s my belief that even if they did find some (nitrates), there’s no reason in this world to have to put in a sewer plant, because if there is, let’s say 5% of the people maybe causing it, for less than $4,000 they can treat the water after it’s gone through the septic tank, before it goes into the leach lines. It makes the nitrates disappear, and the water will actually be a lot cleaner than Morro Bay.
    “The RWQCB has never conclusively proven that the septic tank or leach lines are contaminating the aquifer. The law says (the RWQCB) must substantially prove before you can force an issue, and they haven’t proven it at all, let alone substantially. They haven’t even tested the water that comes from the leach lines.”

Shifting Nitrate Standards
    “Furthermore,” he added, “and it’s not necessarily the fault of the RWQCB, the State arbitrarily jumped from the nitrate standard of 45 parts per million to 10 parts. And even at 45 parts per million, there’s a question that it does any harm. They say it may cause ‘blue baby syndrome,’ but they can’t even prove it. So, when it comes right down to it, they are throwing a lot of money away just to satisfy their egos.”
    Dr. Alexander believes the water boards promote an imperial strategy designed essentially to secure and expand their power base. “The water boards like their projects as expensive as possible. If the projects aren’t expensive, no one will appear before them and the room will be empty. But if the expense is so great that it requires state and federal money, then all must kneel before them and beg.”
    ‘Most expensive’ also has a loud outpost in Los Osos. “There are quite a number of people who would like to see the most expensive operation possible go in.”
    Curiously, when Dr. Alexander presented his opinions and the basics of his system in person at a February 16 special meeting of the Los Osos CSD, he received a lukewarm reception from what had been cast as an environmentally-friendly board, while some of the board’s most ardent supporters expressed real enthusiasm for Dr. Alexander’s findings and suggestions. None of the board members asked Dr. Alexander a question, although Board President Lisa Schicker did meet with Dr. Alexander a few days later. Still, with its breach of contract lawsuit against the State an attempt to restart the original SRF loan, it appeared that the board had already made up its collective mind that they prefer to harness the expensive gravity collection system from the remains of the defeated megasewer than deal with Dr. Alexander’s shocking $4,000-per-household septic solution that focuses on individual homeowner compliance and further undermines the argument for gravity.
    Dr. Alexander blames the big money influence on an entrenched bureaucracy of clueless officials and money-fed consultants at the bottom, and water boards at the top, with the Tribune applying pressure from the outside. “It’s big business, and for that reason the Tribune hasn’t the slightest motivation to say anything can be done at less expense. That (expense) is why 40% to 50% of the people are going to have to move out.”
    The price tag originally hung on the Tri-W sewer was never right from Day One, Dr. Alexander said, and gravity collection was never the answer for Los Osos. “To put in a gravity system, where you put a deep pipeline in sandy loam, can’t be done for the price [the recalled board] quoted. Changing the location, as far as I’m concerned, is nothing but a smokescreen. It’s too bad, because the people of Los Osos didn’t need any of this at all.”
    Dr. Alexander’s lack of faith in the RWQCB goes back many years when an earlier executive officer, an engineer, responded to his idea by informing him, “There will be nothing new used in my jurisdiction unless it has 25 years experience.” That set the landscape for Dr. Alexander. Years of experience have only confirmed for him at least that most engineers, in general, out of fear, follow the book, “the same book I read 50 years ago—and it was 25 years old then!
    “There have been dramatic changes since then, but the RWQCB is still pushing old methods in new packages. Now the very system that they’re promoting is turning out to be one of the biggest hazards in life.”
    Dr. Alexander explains: “We are fighting pandemics right now, and the sewer system (the RWQCB) is recommending actually is an incubator for pathogens that are immune. That plus the fact that when you gather all the sewage into one big building or plant, an earthquake just fixes everything up but good! It ruptures lines, knocks out power and buildings… There are many ways it can be destroyed.
    “The tendency now is to go back to individual systems, so we don’t have this massive problem to treat. The individual system certainly could have an overflow, but one little overflow is nothing compared to what you will have if you have millions of gallons of raw sewage floating around.

Septics and Nitrates
    Dr. Alexander questions the very notion of a nitrate crisis. “The whole program of nitrates is based upon two babies being blue babies because it was said they had nitrates. If you have really, really high levels of nitrates, that could be a problem, but to my knowledge, other than ‘blue baby syndrome,’ there has never been any indication that it hurts teenagers or adults, only babies earlier than six months of age.
    “When the federal government set the absolute [nitrate] limits at 45 parts per million, the lawyers appointed by the State’s water quality control program lowered it to 10, with no scientific evidence at all. It went from 45 federal to 10 state—based on a gut feeling, I guess. I’ve never heard a reason for it.”
    So Dr. Alexander invented his own solution to nagging nitrates. He developed a small onsite add-on system called the Agglutinator. The water coming out of the septic tank is put through this system, and, according to Tank Nelson, Dr. Alexander’s biographer, “the water going out in the leach lines is cleaner than the ocean. In fact, it would upgrade the ocean if it ever got there.”
    First, Dr. Alexander said, the RWQCB needs to get back to basics and test correctly to find out exactly what and where the problem is. If there is a problem, he said, hook up the Agglutinator and “a regular septic tank run correctly in six feet of soil removes the nitrates. No matter what you put into it, the water you put into the leach lines is better than the water that’s already there.
    “The water is treated after it’s gone through the septic tank but before it goes into the leach lines. It never gets into the sewer system, so there can’t be any contamination. It’s non-electrical, and it can be done with harmless chemicals. It’s as simple as a lady doing her wash and putting in soap and Purex.”
    Compare: Cost of the Agglutinator—around $4,000 each, or $20 million to denitrify 5,200 homes in the “Prohibition Zone.” Cost of the Tri-W sewer—$220 million with interest and deferred expenses—when it broke ground back in August 2005, obviously much more if it were re-started today. Moreover, if septics are not the arch polluters of Morro Bay, as the RWQCB has labeled them, then, Dr. Alexander contends, there never was a reason for the sewer in the first place, at least not to clean the water of nitrates, which was the original reason the sewer was mandated in the first place.

Recycling Useful Water
    The burden of proofs falls upon the RWQCB, he believes, not the individual homeowner, to prove each home is polluting. At the same time the RWQCB plays pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with homeowners, it has absolutely no hard data to prove Dr. Alexander wrong, or that his system won’t work—no more than they can prove that each house in the so-called “Prohibition Zone” is discharging its sewage into the system and, at the end of the system, producing nitrates. Instead, believes Dr. Alexander believes the RWQCB is punishing homeowners for its own long-running failure to provide proof positive of the existence of substantial pollution, and to force siting of the big sewer at Tri-W
    If they really want to know what’s going on under Los Osos, he said, all the RWQCB has to do, all they ever had to do, is dig six feet down below the leach line and report what’s there—not below the horse farm, not through open wells.
    “Even better,” Dr. Alexander suggested, “instead of digging down—which is quite a project to get to several places to check for nitrates—take the sample out of the septic tank itself. We have found that most of the nitrates are removed in the septic tank. Theoretically it’s the leach lines that get rid of them, but we found zero is some of the samples coming out of the septic tanks. And that’s easy to test.”
    By “some way-out chance” that nitrates are still a problem for some people, Dr. Alexander says separating the gray water from the black water and using the gray water to flush toilets would save about 42% of in-house water use. Treating the black water again and using it for flushing would save roughly 80% of in-house water use. “It never gets into the sewer system, so there can be no contamination. If you want to go further than that, they can put in cisterns and get rid of the municipal water and sewer altogether.”
    Testing the way that RWQCB has, or hasn’t, Dr. Alexander said, only guaranteed the expensive project. “The program that they’re advocating for the big sewer system barely touches on water shortage. The system we’re talking about could eliminate the water shortage, instead of quadrupling the water rate or better, which is inevitable. We can actually cut the present rate in half and still have all the water they’ll ever need.”
    Dr. Alexander points out that the State and Regional Health Department have said that as long as the water is recycled in the house in which it originated—“it’s none of their business.
    “The law also says that the RWQCB cannot tell you what treatment you have to use. They can tell you that you have to do something, but they can’t tell you how to do it… They’re circumventing the law, and we have to stop that nonsense.”

Contributing to this article was Tank Nelson, author of Dr. Alexander’s recently completed biography, “Burning Water.” For more information about this book, call (805) 772-1683