MSNBC is reporting that a referendum to rename a municipal sewage treatment plant after our current President is going down to defeat. I couldn't be happier. This is an instance of common sense trumping political games.
Although "poop" is hysterically funny to children everywhere, what is at stake is much larger; image and purpose. According to MSNBC;
the treatment plant has won awards from the national EPA
and
currently the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, protects the ocean, fish, mammals and people. Those who work at the plant are proud that there has never been one violation found there.
Water and wastewater infrastructure has been a boon to public health for the past century. Dirty water makes people sick. It is critically important to provide clean water to homes, and it is equally critical to make sure that the rivers that act as a raw water source are themselves clean. Where sewage would be dumped into the ocean, which does not act as a drinking water source, treatment is still essential to prevent contamination of fish that people eat and beaches where people swim. Whereas many people associate our current state of health exclusively with the development of modern medicine such as antibiotics, the drastic decline in numerous communicable diseases in the early twentieth century actually coincided with the construction of water and sewage systems many years before such medical advances were made. Following the Rwandan genocide several years back, when the refugee camps were awash in dysentery and cholera, the international community was not asked only for medicine, but for clean water and sanitation to stem the outbreaks. Why treat when you can prevent? And of course, this is just the public health aspect of sanitation, which says nothing of the important environmental benefits.
So in summary, I say "thank you" to the good people of San Francisco, who understand the societal value of something as funny and gross and removing poop from water. It is critically important to public health and to the environment, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be associated with a president who sought to undermine both.