By Marc B. Haefele

I don’t think you see the cheese called scamorzza much anymore,  even in New York’s Italian suburbs where I first came across it a generation ago.  It was tasty stuff that was said to go bad almost overnight. So you tried to buy it in small slivers, and if you asked for a half pound, the vendor might slip and cut you a pound and a half. He was that anxious to get rid of it. If you were really slow, you might buy an entire five-pound scamorzza cheese, most of  which, unless you had a really hungry family of 12 waiting at home, would be stinking up your refrigerator long before you could finish it.

“Buying the whole scamorzza” thus became a synonym for gullibility.  Today, we abbreviate it as “getting scammed.”

Maybe the biggest and certainly the smelliest scam in LA’s public works history was something that came along nearly 30 years ago. It was called the Hyperion Energy Recovery System. About the only positive thing you could say about the HERS scam was no one profited from it, except assorted engineering contractors, of course.

HERS was intended to solve our city’s most pressing disposal problem--that of the  solid waste processed out of the city’s 500 million gallons per day of sewage. Until public outrage and legal proceedings halted the practice, the city dumped this stuff in Santa Monica Bay. The federal EPA the offered the city the chance to try out a new, “perfect” sludge disposal system based on a technology used to dry fish livers (I am not making this up), but unproven in the sewage biz.  Fast forward: 20 years and 300 million (mostly federal and state) dollars later, the vast acreage of HERS technology at the Hyperion Wastewater facility was junked without transforming an iota of sludge.

Nowadays, that same sludge goes over the Tehachapis to some 10 square miles of farmlands, mostly in Kern County, where it fertilizes fields where the corn grows 12 feet high and is sold as cattle feed. A happy ending, the BuSan wonks have said. But the Kern folk felt otherwise, and last year passed an initiative banning  sewage sludge on their farmlands. The city of course proposes to fight the ban. But meanwhile, they’ve got at least two backups: the first is another sludge farm further away  in King’s County. The second is a plan to inject the stuff into rock and clay strata a half mile  beneath Terminal Island. This is to start late this year. According to officials, the city and EPA are going to split the $7 million annual costs of running this one. It’s called a pilot program. But it plans to deal with fully 80 percent of the city’s sludge. Which makes it sound much more important than that.

Now I would love for this plan to work. The problem is, according to the people I’ve talked to in both the EPA and Bureau of Sanitation, this is another technology that’s never been put to this purpose before.

Refinery and chemical wastes have long been injected deep beneath the earth for disposal, but not human waste solids, let alone enough of them “to fill a toilet the size of an Olympic swimming pool every four days,” as the Associated Press recently put it. A spokeswoman for Councilwoman Janice Hahn, whose district includes Terminal Island, said there is no neighborhood protest against the waste plan. But aren’t the only residents of TI federal prisoners who don’t get to vote for Ms. Hahn?

There’s an old saying that many things are unimaginable, but anything can happen.  That is what I am afraid of here. This could be another scamorzza. No one expected HERS to be a third-of-a-billion dollar disaster, and no on expects things to go wrong with the TI injection well either. But in my  estimation we just don’t know enough to know what could happen there. So maybe it’s just as well that the city’s got that King’s County sludge site waiting, in case things go wrong. Again.

(Marc Haefele has been covering LA politics for 25 years for the LA Weekly, KPCC Radio and other media. Haefele is a regular contributor to CityWatch.) _