Tahoe Pipe Club: Pointing Out Tahoe's Polluting Pipes

Underground clarity group makes waves with pugnacious style, common-sense approach

Photo Credit: Laurel Ames.

First there was the storm drain calendar, highlighting a polluting Tahoe pipe each month. Then came the videos, showing thousands of gallons of murky, road-soiled runoff shooting out of pipes into one of the world’s clearest lakes. Then came a newsletter entitled “Keeping Tahoe Black?”

In two short years, Tahoe Pipe Club has rattled some cages in the Tahoe environmental community, asked some very good questions, and pointed out common-sense clarity solutions that are receiving growing support around the lake. The club is an anonymous group of engineers, scientists, and business owners who are very publicly calling out what they see as the failure of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in Lake Tahoe’s water quality.

Most provocatively, the group claims that erosion control and gutter-and-storm drain projects around the lake have used millions of dollars of federal environmental money to build projects that have actually harmed Lake Tahoe’s clarity.

Read the story.