PREVIOUSLY

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Remember a couple of hours ago, when we told you that Northtown’s Szechuan Garden restaurant was shuttered at 5 p.m. Friday because it was spilling sewage into a storm drain? Remember when we told you that the city of Arcata, aware of the building’s plumbing problems, had planned on shutting the business Monday, but instead took action for fear that weekend rains would spread the human feces leaking out of the bottom of the restaurant far and wide?

Well, that turns out to be not exactly true. 

What we didn’t know at the time was that, in fact, at least 600 gallons of contaminated water from the site had already spilled down storm drains and into Jolly Giant Creek and Humboldt Bay at around noon Friday, shutting down all oyster harvesting on the bay from then on. The feces had already spread far and wide, before the weekend rains.

In a follow-up call, made after people started notifying us of the oyster closure, the city of Arcata’s environmental services director, Mark Andre, allowed that this, in fact, had been the case after all. 

“All sewage discharges to the bay are a big deal that we take seriously,” Andre wrote the Outpost in an email following our second conversation, after the fact of the oyster closure had been acknowledged. “I did not mean to downplay this.”

Despite the fact that the city had been aware of the building’s sewage leak for some time, he continued, immediate action did not seem warranted because it had been thought that the loose sewage was more or less contained to the site. “We had originally thought it was an onsite issue until we looked closer at the downstream stormwater piping network,” he wrote.

Greg Dale, the local operations manager for Coast Seafoods, said today that luckily, his company landed all their Friday oysters right before the shutdown order came through. The company typically makes its shipments on Fridays and Tuesdays, Dale said, and will likely have to delay its Tuesday shipment until tests being run on sample oysters show that they have not been contaminated. He expected — fingers crossed — that would happen as soon as tomorrow evening.

“Things like this happen,” Dale said. “I don’t get too worked up unless it happens more than once. That’s when I get worked up.”

Arcata has cause to be touchy about the amount of fecal matter its creeks carry out to the bay. A Baykeeper study a while back notes that Janes Creek alone habitually washes 375 pounds of E. coli out to sea daily.