Buried Waters - The Wiggle and the Combined Water Treatment Facility

I was so interested to learn recently that the wiggle, a bike route in San Francisco that only uses streets with minimal incline, is actually the location of an underground creek. This makes sense, as water always finds the path of least resistance to make its way through the landscape. This valley was actually flattened by the run of the stream.

Since I live on the wiggle, I'm fascinated by the culture of this famous bike path. I've seen every type of person imaginable ride by my house - young, old, naked, costumed, rich, poor, you name it. Lots of naked people! Lots of bikes that haul a little trailer for a huge sound system.


The wiggle takes the route of the paved over Sans Souci creek. This valley has been used as a transportation path since at least the mid-1800s. Joel Pomeranz states, "In the historic photos that I got from Greg Gaar, in 1856, farm fences went in a wiggle shape along a creek, separating the land that way. The easiest way to get from Mission Dolores to the Presidio (the earliest European outposts here) was right through there, the flattest way."


"A friend at the SF Bike Coalition clued me in to a secret tribute to the vanished waterway, hidden in the mural behind the supermarket. I studied it for about ten minutes before I discovered the words hidden, appropriately, in the brushstrokes of a stream."
- The Bold Italic, Watershed Moment by Matt Baume, June 7, 2010

I was also interested to learn a little more about the pros of cons of the combined water treatment facility. It definitely seems wasteful to put the storm water through the same cleansing process as our sewer water, since the storm water is not as contaminated. At the same time, however, other cities are now thinking about doing the same thing, as storm waters are becoming more and more contaminated with oil runoff and other chemicals.

There does not, at this time, seem to be any clear answer to the issue of combined vs. separate water treatment facilities. Most cities migrated away from combined treatment facilities, but San Francisco opted to not take on the expense or the inconvenience of opening every street in the city.