Where does your wastewater go?
It’s not a question everyone thinks to ask (I certainly never cared to), but it’s an absolutely critical question.
Why am I asking you this?
Well, as an environmental science student, I’ve taken a planning class or two, which was really the first time I ever considered the question.
As someone from a biggish city, the answer is to a wastewater treatment facility, with huge treatment pools and lots of chemicals and dozens of employees.
But what if the nearest town to you has less than 100 people?
Then you may have a septic system, a common way of managing wastewater.
However, here at Capulin, we’re ambitious. Our wastewater is sent to a first treatment pool, where phytoplankton and other natural processes start to treat the water. It’s then sent to a second pool where it is treated with chlorine. Now, to be clear, I wouldn’t drink this water. It looks gross. But, it can be used, so we do. We use it to water our outdoor growing area, where we’ve been working on growing grasses to plant to mitigate erosion on the loose soil of the volcano.
Why am I telling you this?
Because, when one of my seasonal coworkers came into the office last week and said, “Hey guys, did you know there are fish in the sewage lagoon?” I was very, very surprised, but also intrigued. I asked her if they were sunfish, those small fish you catch with your fishing pole from the dollar store when you were a kid, which are warmwater fish tolerant to pollution. She told me no, they weren’t really round, they were more long. Now I’m really intrigued. So I head out to the outdoor growing area and am, once again, very surprised. I saw these.
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