SAN SOUCI MHP

San Souci mobile home park's wastewater plant is badly out of compliance

The wastewater facility serving the San Souci mobile home park, in the Front Range Fans watershed near Boulder, is reporting discharge violations severe enough to leave little room for ambiguity. In its most recent reporting period the facility's own numbers to its regulator show sulfide at over 1,200 times the permitted limit and hydrogen sulfide at nearly 200 times over. Arsenic came in at 34 times the legal limit, and silver, chloride, ammonia, and total suspended solids all exceeded their permits as well. This is not a one-time lapse. Arsenic has run roughly 49 to 54 times over limit in each of the two prior quarters, and chloride, ammonia, and solids violations have now recurred for at least four consecutive quarters. That pattern, more than any single reading, is what marks this as a chronic operational failure rather than a bad week at the plant. What these figures establish is that permitted limits were broken, badly and repeatedly; they do not by themselves show a fish kill or a fouled reach downstream. No streamflow or dissolved-oxygen reading near the site was available this cycle to say what these exceedances look like in the water itself once it leaves the outfall. Context is worth holding alongside the numbers, even without a direct measured link. Boulder County's drought footprint jumped from about 11 percent in extreme drought in mid-July to roughly 85 percent by early August, the kind of shift that generally leaves less water in local streams to dilute any discharge. Whether that dynamic played out at this particular site isn't something the record confirms, but it describes the kind of summer this discharge happened into. Boulder Watershed Collective works on water quality issues in this watershed and is a reasonable point of contact for anyone following the case further.