Toxic Material in Storm Drains : Rain-Washed Streets--a Major Pollution Source

Huntington Harbour, an affluent Orange County marina community adjoining a wildlife refuge, recently earned a new distinction when state officials found the highest levels of toxic manganese recorded anywhere in California.

Traces of lead and zinc found in mussels in the harbor were higher than the amounts found in 90% of other waterways tested. Measurements of the banned pesticide DDT and deadly PCBs were also disturbingly high.

Perhaps, scientists reasoned, the chemicals could be traced to a nearby Navy weapons depot or to boating operations within the harbor. As it turned out, some of them could. By far the highest concentrations, however, came from ordinary storm drain channels washing into the harbor from inland Orange County.

The Huntington Harbour studies, like a number of recent surveys in communities throughout the nation, have documented a newly discovered source of pollution: the vast quantities of automobile lead deposits, tire rubber, backyard pesticides, pet droppings and fertilizers that make their way toward the ocean with each rainfall.

Despite several decades of regulations aimed at checking the flow of raw sewage and industrial waste into the nation’s waterways, federal Environmental Protection Agency officials estimate that 670 pounds of lead and 380 pounds of zinc--both toxic heavy metals--wash every day off the streets of Baltimore, Washington and Hampton Roads, Va., into Chesapeake Bay.

San Francisco Bay every year takes in the equivalent of a mid-size oil spill--about 500,000 gallons of oil and grease--as a result of urban runoff. Regional water quality officials estimate, moreover, that for every pound of heavy metals dumped into the bay from industrial and sewer sources--which are required to have dumping permits--two pounds flow in unchecked with the rain.

“That’s probably the most dramatic example I’ve seen,” said Oakland Regional Water Board spokesman Larry Kolbe. “It means that although we try to do a stringent job of regulating heavy metals being put into the bay, today the majority of the heavy metals aren’t coming from sources that we regulate.”

Regulation Program

A congressional conference committee is expected during the next two weeks to tackle the nation’s first comprehensive regulation program for urban runoff.

EPA regulations issued in August and scheduled to take effect in December, 1987--scheduled for ratification by the committee as part of the reauthorization of the 1972 Clean Water Act--will require cities to apply for the same kind of permits for their municipal storm drains as they now must obtain for regular outfalls from rivers and sewage systems.

The idea, federal officials say, is to get a handle on the extent of the potential pollution of the nation’s streams, rivers and oceans as a result of urban runoff and begin to control it. Yet city officials battling the new regulations believe it is a mind-boggling prospect with implications and potential costs that are only now becoming clear.

“Yes, we would love to clean up. It would be great to clean up. Because it’s true that your average garage owner is generating materials that ought to be removed from the water,” said Susan Trager, an Irvine attorney who specializes in water resources. “But how do you do it?”

A study prepared by a Washington consulting firm for the Irvine Co., which has vast land holdings that could be affected by city-imposed fees to eliminate urban runoff, indicates that there are more than 1 million municipal storm sewers throughout the United States. All of these would require sampling, monitoring and permit applications under the new regulations.

Opposition to Regulations

The National League of Cities, the National Assn. of Counties and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, all opposed to the new regulations, estimate that the costs of applying for permits alone could range as high as $8.5 billion.

EPA officials say the costs are likely to be well below $1 billion. But none of these estimates consider the potential costs of cleaning up storm water once pollutants are identified and standards are established.

The EPA three years ago suggested that it would take $93 billion to bring the nation’s storm sewers into compliance with federal water quality standards. The Irvine Co. study, using an earlier EPA assessment, suggests that the actual price tag would be closer to $647 billion in today’s dollars.

“It would cost a small fortune, by our estimates. It would be devastating,” said Roslyn Robson, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Public Works Department, which estimates that it would cost more than $100 billion to clean up storm runoff in Los Angeles County and between $6 million and $366 million a year just to conduct the required testing of the county’s estimated 1,000 storm drain outlets.

“We endorse the goal of eliminating pollution,” Robson said. “We just feel that we have to proceed in a reasonable manner which doesn’t cripple our ability to continue to provide for the control of storm waters.”

“I don’t think EPA realizes that cities don’t even know where all their storm drains are,” said Barbara Harsha of the National League of Cities. “It’s going to take a lot of time just to identify where they are, where they go and who owns them.”

Cost Estimates Discounted

EPA officials discount many of the cost estimates used by the cities. For instance, they assume that permit applications will cost cities only about $1,000 each, rather than the $8,500 each that the Irvine Co. consultant says is a “best-case scenario.”

Moreover, they say, the agency has already agreed to consider group applications for permits--from groups of cities or even an entire state--rather than requiring individual permits for each of an estimated 1 million storm drains, a concept that William Diamond, EPA Permits Division chief, conceded would be “ludicrous.”

The agency has been a reluctant participant in the regulatory effort from the beginning. Although the 1972 federal Clean Water Act required discharge permits for all “point sources”--pipes, ditches or other conveyances that deposited some discharge into a public waterway--the EPA never considered storm sewers to be affected by such regulation.

To clear up any misunderstandings, the agency attempted to issue a blanket exemption for storm sewers in 1973. But the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit organization, challenged the exemption, and the challenge was held up by the appellate courts.

For the last 10 years, the EPA has been circulating various regulatory proposals in an attempt to comply with the court order, and the current regulations were tentatively written into law last summer when Congress incorporated them into an extension of the Clean Water Act.

Exemption Sought

Now, municipal officials throughout the nation are attempting to persuade Congress to exempt municipal storm sewers from the regulations until more studies can be done on urban runoff and the costs of containing it.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups are mounting an equally aggressive effort to keep the regulations intact.

To back their demands for storm water regulation, environmental groups point to a four-year, $28-million study of urban runoff completed by the EPA in 1983. It concluded that storm water has threatened the “beneficial use” of waterways in scattered, mainly urban areas throughout the nation.

One of the most alarming findings to environmentalists were measurements showing that total suspended solids in storm water--dirt and silt that may carry other harmful chemicals--were 10 times the amount found in outfalls from many sewage treatment plants.

Toxic heavy metals were frequently detected. Lead in excess of federal water quality standards was discovered in 94% of the samples taken. Similar measurements for copper were found in 82% of the samples, zinc in 77% and cadmium in 48% of the samples.

These findings mirrored similar studies done in California, which has had a regulatory program for more than two decades that requires permits for the most likely sources of runoff pollution, such as cattle feed lots, industrial yards or oil refineries.

Problem of Cleansing Water

But no one, not even the EPA, is sure about how to clean up rainwater once permits are issued under the new federal regulations. The agency has proposed to look at that issue over the next two years, and EPA officials are certain that massive treatment plants of the kind envisioned by city officials will not be required for all, or even very much, storm runoff.

Instead, state and federal officials are looking at less expensive measures like erosion control, berms and settling basins that would clean up storm water before it is discharged into public streams.

San Francisco, for example, is capitalizing on its antiquated storm drain system, which mixes storm flows with regular sewage. While such systems have had the potential of spilling raw sewage into streets or waterways during heavy rains, San Francisco is in the midst of a massive project that will eventually allow pollutants to be removed from both sewage and storm water at city treatment plants.

The issue of who would pay for cleanup efforts has not been resolved. The cost issue alone, city officials say, would make the EPA’s group-permit concept unworkable, since municipalities would never be able to agree on how to share costs for cleanup.

‘Every City Is Unique’

“Every city is unique in terms of its geographic location, in terms of the amount of rainfall, the frequency of rainfall,” said Robert Rose of Billings Associates, an Irvine Co. consultant. “I can’t conceive of a circumstance in which you could get a representative sample of cities’ pollution.”

Forming assessment districts to help pay the bill would be difficult, other local officials argue. Would cities, for example, be allowed to bill a garage owner who washed battery acid down the gutter or a homeowner who used too much fertilizer? If so, how much should they pay?

“And even after you figure out how to treat the stuff and you decide who pays, what do you do with the (polluted) material after it’s removed from the water?” asked attorney Trager. “We’re barely coming to grips with those questions with the water that’s being treated now.”