Page 2 March 3, 2022 EL SEGUNDO HERALD
Travel
The Thing About Istanbul
Article and photos
by Ben & Glinda Shipley
It’s New Year’s Eve on Pera peak, the onetime
Venetian quarter of Istanbul, and two
beautiful Turkish girls in miniskirts, gaudy
blouses, and five-inch heels race awkwardly
down a steep street, yelling for a taxi. A
group of old codgers barely glances up from
their card game, but two young, male loiterers
rouse from their torpor to hurl indignant
insults at the scantily clad girls. The girls
jeer and return the abuse, as they climb into
their cab and speed away.
This is something you think about when
you visit Istanbul. Pera and Galata; the business
district and the university quarter; the
famous old palaces and mosques; all sit in
Europe. The Greeks settled Constantinople, the
Romans civilized it, and for much of its history,
liberal Europeans sporadically dominated
its public affairs. After 1453, when the great
Ottoman Sultans took over, they might have
preached Islam, the Caliphate, and a weak
Europhobia, but for the most part, they were
the most tolerant and internationalist rulers of
their age. And when Kemal Atatürk became
the father of modern Turkey, his determined
secularism set the tone for eighty years of
religious and cultural tolerance.
But times do change, and in the last seventyodd
years, the lure of jobs and the big city
has emptied the Anatolian countryside of
millions of its underemployed youth. Today,
Galata—Fishing family-style from Leonardo da Vinci’s favorite bridge.
See Travel, page 15
Council Lashes Out at Hyperion;
Grapples with Retail Cannabis
Stores and Outdoor Dining
By Liz Spear
Hyperion, cannabis, and outdoor dining
were three of the top topics during Tuesday
night’s regularly scheduled El Segundo City
Council meeting, which lasted just one minute
or two over five hours. Now that the official
report on what transpired at the City of Los
Angeles-owned and operated Hyperion Water
Reclamation Plant has been released, council
members had much to say in the aftermath
of the plant’s massive failure and emergency
situation that arose last July. In addition, a
cannabis initiative that has qualified for the
November 8th election ballot sparked heated
conversation amongst council members now
that the city is closer to having to allow retail
marijuana shops into the city. Council members
also grappled with the timing on dismantling
the city’s current outdoor dining areas that use
roadway travel lanes and/or public-right-ofway
areas, including curbside parking spaces,
now that previous COVID-19 restrictions are
diminishing and California state and L.A.
County residents move closer to returning to
pre-pandemic conditions.
With a now publicly released report on what
caused the Hyperion emergency July 11-12,
council members were given two presentations,
one on the report released February 11
by the ad hoc committee formed last year to
investigate and produce a report detailing the
causes of the plant failure; the other on air
quality issues related to the plant. Michael
Stenstrum, who holds a Ph.D. in Environmental
Systems Engineering and is a Distinguished
Professor in the UCLA Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, delivered the first
presentation. Stenstrom, who told the council
he has visited more than 230 wastewater plants
and first visited the Hyperion plant in 1968,
gave an abbreviated version of the full report,
noting that three specific failures caused the
near-catastrophic flooding of the plant and
subsequent release of 17 million gallons of raw
sewage into the ocean off of Dockweiler and
El Segundo beaches. He noted that the initially
proposed cause of the plant emergency — that
“a large dump of material” had blocked the
screens in the Headwaters building, which then
caused flooding of plant buildings and roadways,
was proven to be incorrect. Instead, he said that
the Grit Chambers where water and waste flow
after it goes through the Bar Screens failed,
with two of its three chopper pumps failing.
He said that two properly functioning chopper
pumps should have been enough to avoid
the emergency but that the one functioning
pump was not sufficient. He also said that a
“high-level alarm” was missed by operational
staff, noting that the alarm was included in a
printout and not registered as a siren or horn.
The third error came after a potential bypass;
the “stop locks” were no longer operable due
to the high level of water accumulated. The
stop locks could not be raised, and as the
emergency grew and the water levels rose,
the water then “followed a gravity flow path
to emergency storage,” which housed electrical
equipment that then shorted out, causing
an even greater emergency. He also noted that
the Headwaters building staff is “consistently
understaffed” and the least desirable position
in the plant and that swimmers in ocean waters
can be exposed due to the fact that it takes
24 hours to get lab results on contaminated
ocean water. He suggested a mechanism be in
place to alert ocean water users immediately
when a Hyperion release into the ocean has
been triggered.
See City Council, page 14
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