Two years after the successful Cuban Revolution in 1959 — in April 1961 — a group of about 1,500 Cuban exiles and US military advisors landed in Cuba with the intentions of initiating a civil war, hoping for the overthrow of Fidel Castro and his government. The main invasion force landed at Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. The invaders had been secretly trained in Guatemala by the CIA and US military advisors, and the invasion was supported by the US Air Force in planes painted to look like Cuban military planes. The plan had been concocted by the Kennedy administration to have the appearance of a rebellion of Cubans, with no participation by the US military.
The Castro government learned of the planned invasion, and the 1,500 US-backed soldiers immediately found themselves surrounded — by 25,000 Cuban soldiers and armed police — and were nearly all taken prisoner within three days. The Kennedy administration continued to publicly deny any involvement in the failed attack, but the ultimate outcome was to reveal the US, to the world and to the Cuban people, as a military bully.
And as an incompetent world leader.
The invasion had been planned by some of the smartest men in Washington DC. Following the disaster, the Kennedy administration conducted a self-evaluation: why had this plan gone so terribly wrong? Apparently, a key component of the plan’s failure was “GroupThink.” No one in the administration had been willing to question the plan. Essentially, everyone agreed on every aspect. No one was playing devil’s advocate.
I stated earlier in this editorial series, that the 7-mile-long sewer pipeline from downtown Pagosa to the Vista Waste Water Treatment Plant, should never have been built. But the two agencies that colluded to finance and build the pipeline — Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) board and staff, and the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District (PSSGID) board — suffered from that same ailment: GroupThink.
Except that the Town Council — acting as the PSSGID board — had heard, loud and clear, from its own staff. “Don’t do this. You are making a big, big mistake.”
That advice was ignored.
It’s easy to criticize decisions made in the past. The good news is that our current PAWSD board and our current Town Council are — in my humble opinion — much less likely to engage in GroupThink, and much more likely to debate and discuss difficult decisions, than what we saw in the past.
Yesterday in Part Six, I mentioned the air pump in our family fish tank that, years ago, provided us with feelings of benevolence, but didn’t necessarily keep our tropical fish alive. We really didn’t understand why we’d wake up in the morning to find yet another innocent Tetra or Guppy floating belly up. We were amateurs when it came to fish habitat. We were inexperienced beginners.
In 2016, the Town of Pagosa Springs sanitation district began diverting its sewage from the old (and failing) sewer lagoons south of Yamaguchi Park into a 7-mile-long pipeline, and using two massive pumps to send our waste water uphill to the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Vista Waste Water Treatment Plant. (I use the term ‘our’ because I’m one of the Town’s sewer customers.) The transition created some problems, mostly connected to a slow-moving flow through the pipeline. During certain seasons, the sewage from downtown was taking up to 13 hours to make the seven mile journey, which allows for the growth of anaerobic bacteria in the oxygen-deprived sludge, and the resulting generation of H2S (hydrosulfuric acid) — which produces the smell of rotten eggs, much to the dismay of uptown neighborhoods near the second pump station.
No one in Pagosa has ever operated a 7-mile sewer pipeline. We’re beginners.
An experimental pilot program last year, involving the addition of oxygen to the Town sewage, failed to produce significant results. But there’s apparently more than one way to add oxygen to a sewer pipe. And more than one way to remove H2S from the air inside the pipeline.
From the PSSGID agenda packet for January 7, 2020:
Wet Well Wizard
The purpose of a WWW is to build the dissolved oxygen (DO) in the water of the lift station to eliminate anaerobic bacteria and build a large population of aerobes. It may take a week or so, but once a Wizard system is installed in a lift station, a lift station will contain from 2.5 PPM to 7 PPM of DO. Once this takes place, odor in the water is quickly improved along with quality. Aerobic microbial populations are extremely successful in eliminating the biological and organic/chemical components that are found in lift station water…
The “aerobes” mentioned here are oxygen-loving bacteria, and anyone who is dealing with sewage appreciates the presence of aerobes. Or so I understand.
The Wizard is 24” high and the bubbles it is ejecting are a minimum of 1” in size and they are spinning viciously. The purpose of this action is twofold…
The friction between the water molecules and these large bubbles causes far more diffusion of DO into the water than any number of fine bubbles… These large bubbles can never be sucked into pump volutes on the bottom of the lift station…
I will be the first to admit, I’ve never witnessed a viciously spinning bubble, and the very thought of viciously spinning bubbles causes me to smile. But if this is what it will take to solve the odor and “FOG” problems experienced by the PSSGID staff — and by the neighborhoods near the sewer pipeline — then I’m all in favor of helping pay for a Wet Well Wizard with my sewer bill contributions.
(“FOG” stands for “Fats, Oil, and Grease” that get dumped into a sewer system — generally from restaurants — that cause problems in pipes, pump stations, and treatment facilities.)
Here’s a three-minute video showing the ‘Wet Well Wizard’ in action.
Apparently, with the combination of two products, the Syneco Systems Air Scrubbers and the Reliant Water Technologies Wet Well Wizard, the product distributors “can guarantee that the wet well conditions will improve dramatically, and the odor issue will no longer exist.” Total cost to Town sewer customers, over the next 20 years, will run about $750,000, we’ve been told. But of course, we were told that the sewer pipeline itself would cost about $4 million. When the bids came in, the price was $6.8 million… (not including additional money spent by PAWSD, laying a new water line adjacent to the sewer line.) And we’ve spent how much more, since then, trying to fix pipeline design and operational issues? No one, I think, knows how much more.
What most of us see is our sewer bill. Folks in the Pagosa Lakes area uptown are paying $32 a month for sewer treatment. Those of us living downtown are now paying $43 per month… $516 a year.
For comparison, homes in downtown Durango and in Bayfield are paying about $49 a month.
It’s getting so it doesn’t pay to flush your toilet, anywhere in Colorado…