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The delay gave everybody time to think. Arcata still needed an alternative disposal system that would "enhance" Humbolt Bay. Its sludge-skimming plant piped the city's wastewater into an oxidation pond (where most microbes are rendered harmless by sunlight), but the runoff no longer met legal standards. Locals knew vaguely that wastewater had some environmental pluses. Humboldt Bay oysters fed on its nutrients, and Professor Allen, a likable tinkerer whom Klippity Klopp calls Crazy George, raised salmon fingerlings in a mix of sea and wastewater. Other ideas emerged. HSU biologist Stan Harris was for a bird sanctuary. Gearheart came in as an expert on oxidation ponds.
City-hall workers naturally dubbed their new professorial task force "Fishy" (Allen), "Tweety" (Harris, the bird man) and "Blue Eyes" (Gearheart). Another nickname mattered: an abandoned dump near the oxidation pond was called Mount Trashmore. No one put it all together until Allen probed his students one day. A student "who slept all the time" raised his hand. No problem, the student said. "Just run it ((the wastewater)) around Mount Trashmore."
Allen remembers a lightning bolt. "I ran out of class to get Bob, who said, 'Oh my God!' " He recalls, "We rushed to the site, tramping around in the mud." Their solution: filter the postoxidation pond water through a man-made wetland before piping it into the bay. The process is called polishing. Algae and other potentially harmful microbes cling naturally to swamp plant roots, starting a food chain. Filter-feeding organisms in the marsh water eat them.
Good science as far as it went, but Arcata's thinkers hadn't reckoned with the State of California's political food chain. The city's neighbors still wanted the state system to solve their sewage problems. State bureaucrats believed the city's opposition to the proposed plant was naive and anti- environmentalist. In May of 1977, Arcata approached a regional meeting of the state's Water Quality Control Board and sat for seven hours until allowed to speak during an "open comments" period.
The board demanded a feasibility study of Arcata's proposal in three weeks. "That was war," recalls Gearheart. Such studies normally cost thousands of dollars and take months to produce. But three weeks later, after Gearheart wrote and volunteers made copies all night long at city hall, a Greyhound bus $ took the study away at dawn. The board promptly rejected it. Allen, Gearheart and Councilman Hauser spent nearly two years flying to regional meetings to counter further state objections while they appealed. Finally, the city, through some adroit politicking, won permission from state officials for a pilot project.