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San Francisco, California, USA

Solutions Not Sandbags is a volunteer group of community members who have witnessed the severity and damaging effects of San Francisco’s sewer-flooding in their neighborhoods. Cayuga Avenue, 17th and Folsom, 15th and Wawona—it has happened all over the City.

We organized in 2014 after two devastating storms on December 3rd and 11th swamped our neighbors along the northern end of Cayuga Avenue.

We discovered by talking to old-timers and digging into the history of San Francisco’s sewer-system that this longstanding problem was not a surprise to City leaders. We learned the hard way that it would not be easy to find relief for those affected homeowners, business owners, and renters. At a minimum we just wanted to bring attention to these frequent sewage discharges into our homes, sidewalks, and streets—to make sure people knew what was going on.

We soon learned that deny, delay, and litigate seemed to be the way to play these kinds of “games.” Given that, we hoped that at least our testimony and truth-telling would support those in positions of power to do some good work. We believed that the local regulatory agencies would be able to force the City to correct what was wrong and to fix the infrastructure.

We have been somewhat successful in that. We believe our efforts helped lead to the 2021 "Cleanup and Abatement Order" which was issued by the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control board. This required the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to fix the cause of these sewage backups in three parts of the City. 

But our work, unfortunately, is not finished. The SFPUC does not appear to prioritize concerns for public health and safety. For example, the closing of the Pierce Street outfall in the Marina District has led to multiple, recent, and never-before-seen sewer-flooding events along Marina Boulevard. Ocean Avenue along the Ingleside Terrace neighborhood has seen increased flooding.

We continue to encourage the SFPUC to correct and improve their management of our sewer-system. And we continue to support both state and federal regulators in their efforts to work for the common good.

There is more work to be done.

Thank you for your interest and please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

solutionsnotsandbags@gmail.com