The Great Carnelian Bay Poop Spill of 2024

On July 18, a worker contracted with Caltrans drilled into a 24-inch sewage line about 200 feet away from Lake Tahoe. “Oh shit!” I like to imagine the worker yelling as they realize the damaged North Tahoe Public Utility District (PUD) line was sending sewage toward the “Jewel of the Sierra.”

It was 8 p.m. when I received a phone notification from TART Connect about that section of the road being closed, and that it likely would be for the next several hours as they dealt with this sewage leak.

Timeline of events

While the notifications I received seem to downplay the sewage leak, it ended up being much more significant. The pipe released all that pressure, dispensing the contents of flushed toilets onto Highway 28 and heading towards Big Blue.

• July 18, 8 p.m.: Contractor installing pedestrian signage in Carnelian Bay drills into the North Tahoe PUD sewage line.
• July 18, around 9 p.m.: The leak is contained; sewage is then rerouted through a functional system.
• July 19, 3 a.m.: The sewer line is fixed, but crews spent all night cleaning up the spill. They close Carnelian West Beach and the Gar Woods parking lot.
• July 19, 5 a.m.: The North Tahoe Public Utility District (NTPUD) makes a call to the owners of Waterman’s Landing two doors down from Gar Woods that they must close their beach, Patton Landing, due to the sewage spill.
• July 19, 4 p.m.: Gar Woods parking lot reopens.
• July 25, 5 p.m.: Waterman’s Landing gets the call that they can reopen Patton Landing and resume kayak and paddleboard rentals.
• July 31: Carnelian West Beach reopens.

So, what happened?

The contractor was just a few days into the three-week job of putting in pedestrian safety signage on SR-28 and Center Street in Carnelian Bay, near Gar Woods, when he drilled into the pipe. NTPUD on-call utility crews were on scene within minutes, with its full utility emergency response team, general manager, public information officer, and engineering & utility operations manager following soon after. The pipe was fixed within an hour, with NTPUD using its two industrial vacuum trucks plus ten additional mutual aid vacuum trucks to pick up sewer flows from the nearby Carnelian Bay sewer pump station and haul that sewage around the isolated leak section to the Dollar Hill pump station. From there, the trucks then dumped it back into the system and it flowed to Tahoe City.

The NTPUD received help from fellow utility and public works crews from Tahoe City, Olympic Valley, Incline Village, Truckee, South Lake Tahoe, and Placer County. Q&D Construction also pitched in, as they were already in the area working with Southwest Gas on a project.

“The stench was awful,” a local firefighter later told me.

“Worse than being called out to a wildfire?” I asked.

“Different,” he replied, obviously not wanting to think about it, scrunching up his face and nostrils.

As local agencies and waste cleanup crews tried to dispose of the stinky mess and mitigate the health hazard, around 125,000 gallons of waste flowed into the street – 85,000 gallons of it ending up in Lake Tahoe. The Gar Woods parking lot reopened by 4 p.m. Friday just in time for its weekend dinner service (and at least one Tesla Cybertruck was in the parking lot by Saturday afternoon), but it would take another 6-12 days for the California Tahoe Conservancy-owned beaches around the spill site to reopen.

Impact to locals

I live about a mile away from where “The Great Carnelian Bay Poop Spill of 2024” (what I’m calling it) occurred, when on the evening of July 18 I received that TART Connect notification. I didn’t think much of it besides how it affected the seasonal workers who relied on TART and my roommate trying to get home that evening. SR 28 is the only road that connects Tahoe City to Kings Beach, and people getting off work had to go all the way around through Truckee to avoid the closed spill site.

The worst impact had to be to Waterman’s Landing, though.

To give one a sense of where everything lies in Carnelian Bay, the sewage line leak happened at the Center Street/Highway 28 intersection closest to Gar Woods. The restaurant, known for its famous Wet Woody drinks, maintains Carnelian West Beach. On the east side of Gar Woods is the Sierra Boat Company, and on the other side of that is Waterman’s Landing. Waterman’s is a small, family-owned paddleboard rental shop and café right on the shores of Lake Tahoe, on Patton Landing Beach. The family maintains it in exchange for being able to operate their business on it, much like Gar Woods maintains Carnelian West Beach.

I used to work at Waterman’s Landing as a barista for five years, and when I heard how much sewage ended up in the lake so close to their property, my heart immediately went out to the owners. July is their busiest month of the year, and a good 70% of its business relies on paddleboard and kayak rentals, which relies on the beach being open. It was bad enough when smoke from a wildfire shut the lake down, but a poop spill? Just in this small section of the lake?

On July 25, it had been seven days since the Poop Spill and Patton Landing at Waterman’s and Carnelian West Beach had closed. Seven days in the middle of summer when more than half of Waterman’s employees couldn’t come to work. Plus, this was when the Watergrom weekly kids’ camps were taking place, and those all had to be canceled for the following week.

“I think we’re losing around $3,000 a day having the beach closed,” said Anik Wild, owner of Waterman’s Landing.

A good portion of the people who go to Waterman’s Landing are second homeowners in my neighborhood who only come to Tahoe on their two-week summer vacation, and those people have since left Tahoe, possibly armed with the perception that there’s still poop in the lake.

“We’re the local coffee shop, so we’re the first point of contact for many people. Everyone is coming to us with their questions, concerns, and complaints. They’re homeowners, customers, paddlers, coming here to vent about the beach being closed. I’ve spent all my time educating customers on what I know,” Wild said.

On that seventh day when Patton Landing was closed, a couple of guys had paddleboarded downwind to Waterman’s, starting in Tahoe City. When they got out of the water, everyone looked fine. No rashes, no redness, no third eyes starting to form. One of the paddlers visiting from Texas was impressed with the water quality of Lake Tahoe, saying that paddling in it was “like being in the Caribbean.”

“Between Houston water and this, I would drink this water right now,” he said.

While I wouldn’t suggest doing that at a time when the beach was closed due to a sewage spill, it was interesting to see how people assumed their water came straight from the lake. Tahoe tap water is some of the cleanest in the world (we take our own water bottles of it when we travel) but it’s important to remember that it does come from a tap.

One person wouldn’t get a coffee from Waterman’s because she thought that the kitchen staff pulled its water directly from the lake.

“That was a new one for me, something I didn’t even consider,” Wild said.

Fortunately, a few hours after I talked to Anik Wild on July 25, Waterman’s Landing got the call that it could reopen its beach again. The Placer County Environmental Health department evaluated the water every day and fortunately the bacteria eventually dissipated, restoring the lake to its normal levels.

TRPA’s (Tahoe Regional Planning Agency) Jeff Cowen said that bacteria tend to die off because of lack of nutrients and getting absorbed by the sun’s rays. Since Lake Tahoe is so big – it holds roughly 39 trillion gallons of water – there’s likely not to be any long term impact.

“However, that’s no excuse to have this happen. It’s a pretty big deal,” he said.

What is happening now to avoid this in the future?

What’s ironic about the The Great Carnelian Bay Poop Spill is that just a few hours before it happened, I talked to Cowen about a private development project happening on Lakeshore Boulevard in Incline Village. A few residents were upset that they didn’t have a say in what that owner built, and complained to the TRPA. Cowen told me at the time that the TRPA’s main priority is preserving the clarity of Lake Tahoe, and that the Incline Village private development project didn’t affect it.

So, what about an inadvertent poop spill from a government agency private contractor doing a public project?

While the TRPA has a personal stake in this case, the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Board and Placer County are more involved in the investigation.

The TRPA did send an inspector out on July 19 to gauge the impact of the spill, but it was Cowen’s understanding this was an open construction project. He explained that the TRPA signs an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) with every utility company in the basin, which covers a lot of the liability.

However, this was likely considered a low level construction project, and underground utility projects are so common that it would be onerous to have a contract in place with each one. Large construction companies that the TRPA signs agreements with tend to be regulated and more likely to stay in compliance with these types of projects.

Given what happened with this amount of waste ending up in the lake, the TRPA could issue a fine for negligence as it wants to make sure that the risk of these types of incidents happening in the future is as low as possible.

“We’re looking at what happened, how it could’ve been avoided, and what safeguards were in place,” Cowen said.

Cowen explained that usually if the line or area was marked where the underground pipe was laid, then the contractor is required by law to call USA North 811 to perform an underground scan to see where those utility lines are.

According to the USA North 811 website, there’s more than one football field’s length of buried utilities for every man, woman, and child in the US. That’s more than 100 billion feet.

“The NTPUD responded to a USA locate request and marked our underground utilities in the area in advance of excavation and in conformance with requirements. The NTPUD has locating equipment that allows identification of the pipeline,” NTPUD Public Information Officer Justin Broglio said.

What now? What happens next?

Carnelian Bay beaches may be open again and business may be back to normal, but that doesn’t mean that any of the agencies who responded to the spill or Waterman’s Landing have recouped any of their losses.

Waterman’s lost seven days of business in the middle of summer and launched a GoFundMe page to help reclaim some of the lost wages for employees. It could be months or years, if they ever receive any real compensation at all. The TRPA issues fines related to environmental protection, but it’s the county that would be focused on social and economic losses when considering a fine.

Insurance could help. Sometimes there’s money out there to offset costs for events like this, but if you look at the mudslides that shut down Highway 50 in El Dorado County back in 2017, the government offered a low-interest limited-time loan program to help businesses get back on their feet.

Lahontan Regional Water Quality Board Public Information Officer Nick Cahill said the agency was not involved with the construction project and didn’t permit it, and it didn’t really have a reason to, as the crosswalk signage project wasn’t intended to have any impact on water quality. Cahill shared a case that happened in July 2005 when two property owners and a contractor were building a pier off the shoreline in Kings Beach and punched a hole in a 14-inch sewer line. That report stated that “pressurized sewage spewed into Lake Tahoe for five hours, but much of it was trapped and returned to the sewer system. However, enough pollution reached the waters of Lake Tahoe that local North Tahoe beaches had to be closed for 10 to 16 days.”

The complaint stated that the contractor, Pacific Built, Inc., failed to check with USA North – “a typical standard of care to locate underground utilities prior to commencing an excavation activity” – but that the construction company employees offered their help and equipment to the NTPUD in the hours after the pipe was punctured. In that case, Lahontan proposed a $700,000 penalty to be paid to the Waste Discharge Permit Fund to protect the state’s water quality.

“The damage caused to local businesses isn’t our purview,” Cahill said. “We’re doing our part on what went wrong, where, and why.”

Only time will tell what happens to the investigation, and for more information about California Water Board’s enforcement cases, you can visit the state’s water enforcement website.

In the meantime, the beaches in Carnelian Bay are open, Waterman’s Landing is serving delicious coffee made with clean water, and Lake Tahoe is still blue.