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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

I lived near waste center myself (sewage treatment plant in Bayview SF) with all the smells it emitted, but I'm still really glad it exists!

It definitely should be regulated to not offgas like that, but we can/should solve those problems. It wouldn't even be that hard - probably like $10-50M or so.

We need to address the lack of true democratic representation in those communities allows those problems to persist. It's not because of lack of tech or finance.

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I guess another way of saying that is that the US does not have "modern, well regulated landfills".

You seem to be conflating landfills (where trash that's trucked away from your curb goes to be buried) and sewage treatment plants (where the stuff you put down your pipes goes to be processed into clean water, fertilizer, and "other"). They are completely different things.

In my city, the solids from the sewage treatment plant are trucked to the landfill.

Most places. the solids are either burned or dumped.

I once looked at apartments in Bayview and I feel like you're really underselling how bad it smells. If it were a vast open container of raw sewage, I would not be surprised.

I'm shocked humans are allowed to live there. Nothing that smells that bad could possibly be safe.

Also that whole area is a liquefaction zone, so when the earthquake happens, I'm sure it'll be a bio-hazard disaster.

And that's before accounting for the radioactive waste the US Navy dumped at Hunter's Point. There's a reason why the life expectancy of a black man in San Francisco is 20 years less than that of other men in the city, and actually worse than the life expectancy of black men nationwide.

was curious, here's source for the superfund site searching for radioactivity from the EPA:

https://semspub.epa.gov/work/09/100021230.pdf

How many toilets would this facility have for workers there? 10 million would only allow for 5 at the current price of 1.7 million per toilet.

Anyways, snark aside: if this was for decades during your formative years, and you were close enough to be regularly exposed to runoff, please start getting regular cancer screenings.

If it was just a few years in your 20s you're probably fine (per the EPA, but maybe also screen).

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