Golf balls and Manholes
There are over 300 miles of sewer lines in the canyons of San Diego. As can be expected, these sewers and manholes can get overloaded or break, spilling millions of gallons of untreated sewage and the contents of your toilet into the ocean and canyons. Only a few years ago, the EPA ranked San Diego in the worst quartile in terms of sewage spills. Thus, the San Diego Oceans Foundations works with the public to raise awareness and recruit volunteers to patrol the canyons and monitor the status of manholes and the sewage system. And so today, we drove out to Tecolote to clean up the canyon and inspect the manholes. The area we hiked was extremely wild and not charted (at times the trail simply disappeared). At one point, we ended up on the highway:
However, we did manage to find 16 manholes, one of which we reported as broken. We also collected several full garbage bags of plastic and glass along (and off) the trail.
We also stumbled upon an unexpected find…..golf balls. They were buried in the soil and embedded in the walls of the river. By the end of the day, we’d dug out hundreds and hundreds of golf balls. Lugging the bags back to the car was no small task, but we managed it and now have an impressive collection of golf balls weighing more than many of our volunteers.
In the evening, we went to Old Town to have dinner. It was a very festive atmosphere with open markets and colorful colonial and Hispanic decorations.
The Duke-Villanova game happened to be on TV while we ate our tacos…..its result made me quite sad and robbed our group of free churros (our waitress promised us all free dessert if Duke won). Next year……
Tomorrow, we will be working with the Audubon Society to restore bird habitats. Should be really fun, and we’ll definitely get to see wildlife this time!
