Environmentalists Vow Suits on Toxic Dumping

A coalition of environmental groups, charging a failure of Orange County and Los Angeles sanitation districts to halt industrial dumping of toxic materials into sewer systems, threatened Wednesday to take legal action against offenders if the local sewer agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency do not crack down.

Toxic metals and chemicals, most from metal-plating and semiconductor firms, are the single greatest threat to the health of Santa Monica Bay, said representatives of Citizens for a Better Environment, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters.

‘Environmental Crisis’

“It amounts to an environmental crisis,” charged Mark Abramowitz of CBE, a Los Angeles-based environmental organization that has tried to document illegal dumping of hazardous materials in California waters.

However, officials of the three sanitation districts studied criticized the CBE report as inaccurate and misleading, with one terming it “shallow” and “a real disappointment.”

Abramowitz said Wednesday that the CBE study found that more than 100 companies each in Orange County, the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County are dumping excessive amounts of cadmium, chromium, zinc, cyanide, lead, nickel and silver, among other toxic materials, into sewer lines. Federal regulations banned such practices 18 months ago.

The coalition called for aggressive enforcement actions by the sanitation districts, the state’s regional water quality control boards and the EPA to force violators to comply with the law. CBE also called for standardized reporting procedures, comprehensive audits and active monitoring of industrial dischargers, rather than reliance upon self-monitoring data.

“The absolute worst case . . . in the entire state,” said Abramowitz, is in Orange County, where 50% of the 242 industrial dischargers into the County Sanitation Districts of Orange County are out of compliance.

He charged that the Los Angeles city system is next, with 103 of 276 industrial dischargers out of compliance with federal standards. Abramowitz contended that the figures “represent a severe breakdown of environmental law enforcement.”

He added that the Los Angeles County sewer-treatment system has 105 of 591 industries out of compliance.

CBE contended that those wastes are carried to sea via outfalls in Santa Monica Bay, off Palos Verdes and off Huntington Beach.

Bob Miele, head of technical services for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, concurred with CBE’s numbers but said the group failed to point out that the agency meets environmental discharge standards off Palos Verdes because the pollutants are removed as they come down the system.

Blake Anderson, head of operations at the County Sanitation Districts of Orange County, said his agency also meets discharge standards off Huntington Beach, with the exception of PCBs, a highly toxic insulator whose use has been banned. He said the agency has been unable to pinpoint a source of the carcinogen but is proposing a $200,000 study to trace it in the sewer system.

Miele and Anderson both pointed out that CBE failed to note enforcement actions taken regularly by both agencies. Miele pointed to 36 metal-plating companies that his agency and the EPA cited last week for repeated violations after more than a six-month documentation process.

‘Try to Shut Them Down’

“In 60 days, something is going to happen to those companies,” Miele predicted. “We could try to shut them down if they do not come into compliance.”

Del Biagi, director for the Bureau of Sanitation for the City of Los Angeles, said Wednesday that CBE’s numbers are dated. Biagi said the city has reduced the number of industrial dischargers out of compliance to 16% of the 276 firms.

Calling CBE’s conclusions inappropriate, Biagi said the group fails to take into account the month-by-month improvements being made among industrial dischargers.