KETTLEMAN CITY, Calif. — Here at the western edge of the Tulare Lake Basin dwells a smelly industrial site the size of 150 football fields. Roughly eight times a day, its operations are replenished with a truckload of human waste from the residents of Los Angeles County.
Since 2016, the Tulare Lake Compost facility has been converting Southland sewage sludge into high-grade organic fertilizer, and sparing L.A. County the bother of burying its waste in local landfills.
But as epic Sierra Nevada snowpack threatens to overwhelm this phantom lake bed with spring runoff — inundating a region that has already suffered flooding from a series of powerful storms — some fear the facility could be transformed into an environmental disaster.
