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Photograph by Steve Enders
Cameron Colson (left) and Clifford R. Young check the storm drain at the GreenTeam recycling yard in San Jose. At this one drain, the Drain Sentinel has collected 2,300 pounds of polluted material that otherwise would have gone straight into San Francisco Bay.
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A Saratogan living life in the sewer to save the bay
By Steve Enders
Cameron Colson has traveled all the way to the middle of San Jose from his cold office in north Sunnyvale just to stick his hand in a yucky storm drain at the city's GreenTeam recycling yard.
After lifting the grate off the top, he looks in and nods his head in approval.
"See, look. There's clean water in there," Colson says, "and about, what, three or four inches of solids?"
He pokes around inside some more, puts his hand in and extracts a fistful of gunk.
"Man, and it stinks, too. Can you smell that?" he asks, slapping the stuff down on the pavement in front of him.
Colson has just pulled out about a pound of goo that, because of a new device he's helping to sell, might just prove to be the thing that finally cleans up the polluted San Francisco Bay. Inside the drain lies another two or three pounds of stuff that will never get into the water.
Year after year, studies are released telling us just how bad the water is in the bay. Governments, environmental groups and other private organizations have long scrambled to come up with solutions to clean it up.
Colson, a native Saratogan, and his partner, inventor Clifford Young of San Jose, are hoping to make the sale and save of a century with Pollution Reduction Services and their Drain Sentinel.
Colson thinks he could have solved the city of Saratoga's dirty creek problem long ago by installing the relatively inexpensive devices in some of the city's storm drains.
His efforts to sell the device to municipal governments and regulatory agencies have been largely unsuccessful so far. Private companies, however, are beginning to take notice.
So far, 15 devices lie inside the tens of thousands of storm drains that take runoff from city streets to the bay all over the Bay Area.
Young, a former environmental regulator and inspector with various city governments, says nearly 500,000 storm drains exist in the Bay Area, and each one is contributing to the waste that ends up in the bay.
Those spray-painted signs warning people not to dump aren't doing a thing, Colson says, because hardly anyone dumps hazardous materials into the drains. The polluted runoff comes from everything imaginable, and from many different sources.
The device Colson demonstrates in San Jose has kept more than 2,300 pounds of polluted material out of the bay's waters during the past two years. The others have kept another few thousand pounds of stuff out.
It's exceedingly simple, yet different from the many other similar products on the market that promise to clean up storm water runoff.
The interior is a secret, but the outside is just plastic. Water that enters the storm drains is filtered, and less than 10 percent of sand-size particles and hazardous materials can get through, leaving runoff to the bay relatively clean. Oil and petroleum products float on the top of the water that's left inside, and don't penetrate the filter.
"It's not really a filter, it's a monitor," he says, adding that what's left behind is evidence of what's in there and where it came from. Then, companies or cities can take measures to solve those other problems.
But Colson and Young aren't just selling the products, they're selling the service to go along with them. For around $6,000 they'll implement an entire pollution reduction plan for businesses or cities, and maintain and clean the drains as needed.
"Putting this device on each storm drain inlet might sound impossible, but so did putting catalytic converters on cars," he says.
Colson entered the business after years of pressure-washing wood and concrete surfaces. He once had a contract with Shell gasoline stations around the South Bay, which wanted proof that he was using methods to keep the water runoff--it was soiled with gasoline, oil and other material--out of nearby storm drains.
He couldn't do it. He says it was absolutely impossible to keep things out of the drains, so he lost the contract.
"Pressure washing has become a gypsy industry," he says. "They do all their work at night, and when you call the number to report them, it's night so you just get an answering machine. To cite them, you've got to have proof they were there and photographs of them doing it. It's impossible."
So instead of trying to fight polluters, he's trying to work along with them and make them understand that they can keep pollution out of our waters for marginal costs.
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Saratoga, California Since 1975
