The Tahoe Pipe Club

The Tahoe Pipe Club consists of a collection of Tahoe Basin residents and their supporters who focus on the clarity of Lake Tahoe as a touchstone with which to evaluate the environment and the efforts of governmental agencies to protect it. And, since it is declining, the TRPA and other agencies are failing; regulations regarding development are not working. The club includes business owners, construction workers, educators, scientists and engineers, professionals of all stripes, environmentalists, moms and dads, the kids of moms and dads, well, your neighbor next door, people just like you!

Rather than implement policies that would “infiltrate” rain water through the land (which is easy and inexpensive) so that it doesn’t pollute the lake, it is passed directly into the lake with all its gunk and grime through storm pipes everywhere. It is repulsive and totally ignored by the Regional Plan Update and government at all levels.

Check out a great article about this by David Bunker of Moonshine Ink:

Moonshine Ink

Independent Media for Truckee and North Lake Tahoe

Tahoe Pipe Club | Pointing Out Tahoe’s Polluting Pipes

Underground clarity group makes waves with pugnacious style, common-sense approach

Friday, May 11, 2012

By: David Bunker

First there was the storm drain calendar, highlighting a polluting Tahoe pipe each month. Then came the videos, showing thousands of gallons of murky, road-soiled runoff shooting out of pipes into one of the world’s clearest lakes. Then came a newsletter entitled “Keeping Tahoe Black?”

In two short years, Tahoe Pipe Club has rattled some cages in the Tahoe environmental community, asked some very good questions, and pointed out common-sense clarity solutions that are receiving growing support around the lake. The club is an anonymous group of engineers, scientists, and business owners who are very publicly calling out what they see as the failure of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in Lake Tahoe’s water quality.

Most provocatively, the group claims that erosion control and gutter-and-storm drain projects around the lake have used millions of dollars of federal environmental money to build projects that have actually harmed Lake Tahoe’s clarity.

“We can’t rely on the people driving the bus so far,” said a Tahoe Pipe Club member who goes by the pseudonym Tyler Durden, a reference to the book and movie “Fight Club” that Tahoe Pipe Club pays homage to with its name. “They are perpetuating the misappropriation of our taxpayer dollars.”

Durden said that governmental agencies are set on gutters and storm drains, often referred to as “conveyance-based” systems, and have invested little money in the proven, cost-effective, and natural water quality solution of infiltration, where storm water is cleaned by percolating through the soil.

“It’s just manipulating the process to get infrastructure,” said Durden. “It’s just greed.”

Tahoe Pipe Club’s strong words might sound like heated opinions, but the group has been busy compiling an impressive amount of supporting evidence to back their claims. They walk out in rainstorms and test the quality of water at storm drain pipes around the lake. They conduct their own Secchi disk clarity measurements, and they dig into the latest water quality science and post it on their website.

Their simple message is clearly stated in their numerous slogans, which include: “Stop Tahoe Pipes,” “Save Tahoe Clarity,” and “Dry Pipes = Clean Lake.”

“We don’t believe that the solutions that the agencies are proposing are based in true science,” said Durden. “We don’t think the regulators are doing their job, and we don’t think that the environmental groups are speaking out about the right things.”

Durden said that while environmental groups and regulators focus on Tourist Accommodation Units, coverage, and water quality protections on landlocked sites well set back from the lake, dozens of pipes regularly cloud Lake Tahoe’s water and no one is making those pipes a priority.

“The solutions are so simple. It is the fundamentals of hydrology,” said Durden.

The Origins of Tahoe Pipe Club

Original Tahoe Pipe Club members started formulating the idea for the club during attendance at Sierra Club meetings. The meetings were “a way to vent,” said one member. “We called it our environmental AA,” he said. The idea eventually grew into Tahoe First, a name that was derived from the environmental organization Earth First! While that idea never caught on, the seeds of Tahoe Pipe Club were sown.

Tahoe Pipe Club launched in 2010, shot-through with references to the movie “Fight Club” and showcasing a pugnacious style and a healthy dose of humor. One of the groups early T-shirts read: “I need you to arrest me. I belong to an underground Tahoe clarity organization.” Another T-shirt is tie-dyed using clarity-clouding Tahoe algae, dirty storm water, and eroding riverbank mud from a section of the Upper Truckee River that was recently realigned.

But many of the club’s videos are both humorous and startling at the same time. Videos document small lifeless fish floating belly up in murky storm water that pools at the shores of Tahoe. Other videos use Legos and a “Star Wars” theme to show how the pollution from storm water that drains into the lake does not clear up even after being allowed to settle for hours.

Tahoe Pipe Club stepped up its public exposure by showing up at Earth Day at Squaw Valley and showing a short film at the Wild & Scenic Film Festival.

“This is going to be a long, drawn-out discussion with the community and our regulators, and hopefully we start focusing on what really works,” said Durden.

Agency Response

The regulatory agencies around Lake Tahoe have mixed feelings about Tahoe Pipe Club. On one hand they are excited that a group is educating the public about water quality issues.

“That kind of in-your-face message is good because it shows people that there is still storm water that gets to the lake,” said Lauri Kemper, assistant executive officer of the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. “The only way we are going to restore Lake Tahoe is by having residents and visitors alike realize that there is a lot more work to be done.”

But the water board and Tahoe Pipe Club have very different opinions on how to accomplish the water quality benefits. The water board believes infiltration is a cost-effective storm water solution, but says that two things often limit its use — land availability and groundwater levels. Many projects end up using gutters and storm drain with pipe filters or street sweeping to combat pollutants — two methods that Tahoe Pipe Club says are ineffective.

Tahoe Pipe Club says that the problematic fine sediment that impairs Tahoe’s clarity cannot be effectively filtered in a storm drain system. Filters either only catch the larger-sized sediment particles, which are not the biggest clarity concern, or clog during large storm events, according to the club.

The water board has shown some demonstrable commitment to infiltration. The agency has worked with Caltrans to develop a program called NEAT (Natural Environment As Treatment) that identifies areas where water can be effectively infiltrated rather than transported to the lake by storm drains. And recent projects in South Lake Tahoe have used pervious sidewalk to increase on-site infiltration and reduce runoff.

Kemper said that the water board is working on a Basin-wide storm water program connected with the Total Maximum Daily Load program that is expected to reduce storm water pollutants to the lake by 30 percent. It is a lake-wide effort that will employ infiltration, pipe filters, street sweeping, and other BMP (best management practice) methods.

Jeff Cowen, spokesman for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, said that the regulatory agencies’ approach is “attainable and achievable in an acceptable timeframe and we are going to get the results we need.” “The solution seems very simple, but when it comes to implementing them it is a lot more complex,” said Cowen.

And that may be the biggest disagreement between Tahoe Pipe Club and the regulators and governmental agencies around the lake. The Pipe Club believes that implementing storm water solutions is simple. The group thinks water should be treated by restoring the natural hydrologic cycle as much as possible by infiltrating water in all possible locations, whether they are numerous small infiltration trenches, rain gardens, or larger basins.

Infiltration Evangelism

Tahoe Pipe Club’s message is gaining traction among Tahoe residents who have seen regional agencies spend $1.1 billion in federal environmental funds over the last decade and a half, even as the lake’s summer clarity levels have plummeted to alarmingly cloudy levels.

Tahoe Vista business owner Dave McClure said that Tahoe Pipe Club’s message on storm water is not only simple, it is backed by science. “What has happened over the years is there had been so much federal money flowing into the Basin that we have developed an industry of consultants who have promoted the principles of conveyance, control, and treatment of storm water,” said McClure.

“The 5 and .5 micron-size particles, they don’t settle out,” said McClure of the fine sediment that is a major clarity concern. “Those are the ones that are the real problems and we cannot treat those particles with technology … Caltrans is installing all these vaults and putting in 30-micron filters, and all the bad stuff is going right through them.”

On a cold April day, steps away from El Dorado Beach in South Lake Tahoe, Tahoe Pipe Club’s Durden walked by what he views as a successful storm water project. Recent Caltrans work on Highway 50 installed gutters and storm drains, but instead of connecting the storm drains to a pipe that dumped into Lake Tahoe, the project diverted the water to several infiltration basins.

“We look at this as a success story,” said Durden. And then pointing to a thick film of black goo on the bottom of the infiltration basin, he added, “that is what is getting into the lake.”