Updated on February 3, 2021 at 11:14 am
NBC Universal, Inc.
An NBC Bay Area investigation found 30 out of 39 sewage treatment plants located around San Francisco Bay Area are at risk of flooding as sea levels rise due to climate change. Four of those plants could flood with as little as 9.84 inches of sea level rise. That’s an amount that state analysts say is a possibility by 2030. If and when that happens, toilets won’t flush, and in some cases, sewage could back up into homes, whether residents live in the hills or along the coast.
Sewage treatment plants in the San Francisco Bay Area were built on low lying areas along the bay so that wastewater from homes could flow downhill to the facilities using nature’s gravity rather than more expensive machine-driven pumping stations.