Fighting the Big Sewage Machine

Abstract

Salmon were George Allen’s passion. He spent his professional life seeking to combine salmon restoration with sewage recycling, a mission as daunting as the upstream struggle of a weary chinook blocked by a dam. Salmon begin their lives as eggs buried in a gravel nest on a stream bottom, from which tiny fish emerge, swim to the surface, and start to feed. The young grow, lose their infant stripes, and swim to sea, steered by instinct and a physical drive to reach salt water. They range through the ocean for two years or more, growing into magnificent creatures. When the time is right, they return to their home streams to spawn. Crowds of wild, abundant salmon once fought their way up the rivers of the Pacific coast from central California to Alaska. The cycle was eternal, with no distinct beginning or end, until white civilization blocked the rivers with dams and smothered the spawning grounds in silt. By the time Allen came to teach fisheries at Humboldt State, in 1957, salmon runs all along the west coast were depleted. Most of the ancient stocks that had once populated the streams feeding Humboldt Bay were extinct. In an obscure corner of Arcata’s treatment plant, Allen and his students raised young coho and chinook in treated sewage flowing out of the city’s oxidation ponds. Soon after he arrived in Humboldt, Allen had begun planning to resurrect the bay’s lost salmon stocks, and Arcata’s sewage oxidation ponds proved the only likely spot to launch his quest. The oxidation ponds were a constant source of fresh water, with access to a stream, Jolly Giant Creek, which formed a small estuary where he could release fish to the bay. He took fingerlings from any hatchery that had extras and raised them to the moment of smoltification, when they lost their baby stripes, turned shiny silver, and transformed from freshwater to saltwater creatures. His intense hope was that they’d go to sea and return as adults, making the city’s wastewater plant the center of a salmon revival in Humboldt Bay.