Sludge Watch ==> Los Angeles Sludge - Buying the Scamorrza

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:
Whether it is land applied in Kern County or Kings County or pumped under 
the sea near a seismic fault...Los Angeles residents are getting the whole 
Scamorrza.


Sludgewatch Words of the Day:

Scamorzza:Traditional, creamery, stretched, curd cheese made from cow's 
milk. Tradionally made in a money bag shape. The name of this cheese has 
somewhat macabre overtones: scamozza is an expression in southern Italy 
which means "beheaded", it is meant here to describe the cheese's appearance 
(tied in a rope bag).



Scam:
deprive of by deceit
  Synonyms: victimize, swindle, rook, goldbrick, nobble, diddle, bunco, 
defraud, mulct, gyp, con



Los Angeles - Friday, January 12, 2007



Haefele at Large: Buying the Scamorzza
By Marc B. Haefele

I don’t think you see the cheese called scamorzza much anymore,  even in New 
York’s Italian suburbs where I first came across it a generation ago.  It 
was tasty stuff that was said to go bad almost overnight. So you tried to 
buy it in small slivers, and if you asked for a half pound, the vendor might 
slip and cut you a pound and a half. He was that anxious to get rid of it. 
If you were really slow, you might buy an entire five-pound scamorzza 
cheese, most of  which, unless you had a really hungry family of 12 waiting 
at home, would be stinking up your refrigerator long before you could finish 
it.

“Buying the whole scamorzza” thus became a synonym for gullibility.  Today, 
we abbreviate it as “getting scammed.”

Maybe the biggest and certainly the smelliest scam in LA’s public works 
history was something that came along nearly 30 years ago. It was called the 
Hyperion Energy Recovery System. About the only positive thing you could say 
about the HERS scam was no one profited from it, except assorted engineering 
contractors, of course.

HERS was intended to solve our city’s most pressing disposal problem--that 
of the  solid waste processed out of the city’s 500 million gallons per day 
of sewage. Until public outrage and legal proceedings halted the practice, 
the city dumped this stuff in Santa Monica Bay. The federal EPA the offered 
the city the chance to try out a new, “perfect” sludge disposal system based 
on a technology used to dry fish livers (I am not making this up), but 
unproven in the sewage biz.  Fast forward: 20 years and 300 million (mostly 
federal and state) dollars later, the vast acreage of HERS technology at the 
Hyperion Wastewater facility was junked without transforming an iota of 
sludge.

Nowadays, that same sludge goes over the Tehachapis to some 10 square miles 
of farmlands, mostly in Kern County, where it fertilizes fields where the 
corn grows 12 feet high and is sold as cattle feed. A happy ending, the 
BuSan wonks have said. But the Kern folk felt otherwise, and last year 
passed an initiative banning  sewage sludge on their farmlands. The city of 
course proposes to fight the ban. But meanwhile, they’ve got at least two 
backups: the first is another sludge farm further away  in King’s County. 
The second is a plan to inject the stuff into rock and clay strata a half 
mile  beneath Terminal Island. This is to start late this year. According to 
officials, the city and EPA are going to split the $7 million annual costs 
of running this one. It’s called a pilot program. But it plans to deal with 
fully 80 percent of the city’s sludge. Which makes it sound much more 
important than that.

Now I would love for this plan to work. The problem is, according to the 
people I’ve talked to in both the EPA and Bureau of Sanitation, this is 
another technology that’s never been put to this purpose before.

Refinery and chemical wastes have long been injected deep beneath the earth 
for disposal, but not human waste solids, let alone enough of them “to fill 
a toilet the size of an Olympic swimming pool every four days,” as the 
Associated Press recently put it. A spokeswoman for Councilwoman Janice 
Hahn, whose district includes Terminal Island, said there is no neighborhood 
protest against the waste plan. But aren’t the only residents of TI federal 
prisoners who don’t get to vote for Ms. Hahn?

There’s an old saying that many things are unimaginable, but anything can 
happen.  That is what I am afraid of here. This could be another scamorzza. 
No one expected HERS to be a third-of-a-billion dollar disaster, and no on 
expects things to go wrong with the TI injection well either. But in my  
estimation we just don’t know enough to know what could happen there. So 
maybe it’s just as well that the city’s got that King’s County sludge site 
waiting, in case things go wrong. Again.

(Marc Haefele has been covering LA politics for 25 years for the LA Weekly, 
KPCC Radio and other media. Haefele is a regular contributor to CityWatch.)

http://www.citywatchla.com/content/view/145/75/