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For students at Thousand Oaks Elementary School, the only thing worse than losing a game at recess was losing their ball in the polluted Blackberry Creek that runs through their schoolyard.  

“We’d pick it up, wash it down really well, and then not use it for a couple of days,” said Isaiah Torrez, a fifth grader. 

Tuesday, one year after Torrez and his classmates went before the City Council to demand a stop to the dangerous amounts of bacteria flowing down their stream, Mayor Tom Bates arrived with good news. 

After an exhaustive search that cost an estimated $120,000, the city believes it has plugged the leaks from which flowed fecal coliform—minute bacterial particles can cause hepatitis A or diarrhea if ingested in large doses.  

A 60-year-old abandoned sewer line on Solano Avenue was leaking the particles into a catch basin that flowed into the creek, said Director of Public Works Renee Cardinaux, who joined Bates at a school assembly for fourth and fifth graders at Thousand Oaks Elementary. 

Since maintenance workers plugged the holes in the sewer line four months ago, tests have shown acceptable levels of fecal coliform in the creek. Cardinaux said that in about two weeks, if the next reading is also okay, the city would take down the warning signs posted along the creek, which also flows past a toddler park. 

The contamination hadn’t stopped students from learning about science at their creek, teacher Jon Bindloss said. But instead of an outdoor biology laboratory, the creek better resembled a superfund site. Students had to wear elbow-length rubber gloves when they performed their own tests for the particles, he said.  

High readings of fecal coliform have plagued Blackberry Creek intermittently since the city unearthed the 250-foot segment in 1995.  

City engineers worked 200 hours and maintenance workers 140 hours trying to locate the source, Cardinaux said. They shot dye through the plumbing of the buildings on the 900 block of Colusa Street and the 1800 block of Solano Avenue, dropped cameras into storm drains, and dug holes outside of Zachary’s pizza in search of the leak. 

“This kind of thing can drive you nuts,” Cardinaux said. The city is littered with old sewers, he added, and most people aren’t aware they might have an illegal hookup. 

Finally city workers dug a hole at a catch basin beside Peets Coffee and found a culprit they didn’t even know existed. With the holes to the abandoned sewer line plugged, the city is rerouting the catch basin to the storm drain system, before giving Blackberry Creek a clean bill of health, Cardinaux said. 

Blackberry Creek has been an ongoing problem because of its locations in the Berkeley Hills, where there are far more independent and aging sewers that break due to minor earthquakes, said Carole Schemmerling of the Urban Creeks Council. 

The cleanup of Blackberry Creek comes just as advocates for unearthing city creeks are pushing ahead with their most ambitious project: the daylighting of Strawberry Creek at Center Street as part of the redevelopment of the block along with a planned hotel and convention center. 

Juliet Lamont, an environmental consultant for the Urban Creeks Council, insisted Strawberry Creek would not be as susceptible to contamination because it flows above ground through much of the UC Berkeley campus. “If there were a problem it would be very easy to pinpoint where it was coming from,” she said. 

The city’s two other sections of unearthed creek—Strawberry Creek, between Acton and Bonar Streets and Cordonices Creek, between Eighth and Ninth streets—have occasionally tested for unsafe levels of pollution, but not to the extent of Blackberry, Cardinaux said. “Urban creeks are seldom really clean as much as we might wish they are.”  

But that doesn’t mean the problems at Blackberry Creek have biased him against future daylighting projects. 

Cardinaux said that if the creek had not been daylighted and water tests in the bay had shown pollution coming from Blackberry Creek, the city would have had a much tougher and more expensive job locating the problem. 

Students all said they were happy to hear their creek was finally clean, but not everyone was completely satisfied. “It’s really ridiculous how long it’s taken to fix it,” said Julianna Meagher, a fifth grader. “I mean, there’s a tot park right here with two-year-olds. They can’t read the signs.” 

Student Xochi Hernandez had said one problem remained. “I wouldn’t get as freaked out when I touch it now, but if you walk by the pipes, it still smells really bad.”.