Marine Biologist Sees Through Waters Darkly

Rimmon Fay, an outspoken marine biologist and a former member of the California Coastal Commission for six years, has enlightened me by his statements in an interview about the marine environment of our Southern California coast.

In an interview in the Spring issue of California WaterfrontAge, a magazine published by the California State Coastal Conservancy, Fay said: “The Clean Water Act gave us deadline dates by when secondary waste treatment would be the law and sludge discharges would be removed from the ocean. Those deadlines have passed, and we see no new deadlines.” He then cited an inventory of environmental problems and improvements.

Fay charged that sewage sludge (solids removed from water) are being discharged into the ocean by the City of Los Angeles, critically polluting Santa Monica Bay. He also accused Orange County Sanitation Districts with discharging sludge into the sea. His charge against Los Angeles was correct. He was incorrect about the Orange County Sanitation Districts.

Until it completes building a facility to burn its sludge, Los Angeles will continue polluting the ocean under a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Orange County Sanitary Districts buries its sludge in a landfill. However, our sanitation districts do discharge 75 million gallons of “primary treated” sewage into the ocean daily. This is a portion of a total of 245 million gallons daily that are discharged into the ocean, 170 million gallons of which undergo both primary and secondary treatment, according to Corinne Clawson, the Sanitation Districts’ public information officer.

Fay, who has operated Pacific Bio-Marina Laboratory in Venice for nearly 30 years, strongly advocated both primary and secondary waste treatment before sewage is discharged into the ocean. In an inventory of Southern California’s coastal marine environment, he awarded high marks to the City of San Clemente in its implementation of secondary waste treatment. The Dana Point area, with the Aliso Water Management Agency and the discharge at South Laguna, also have satisfactory secondary waste treatment, he said.

Clawson told me that the 75 million gallons that are discharged daily into the ocean by the Orange County Sanitation Districts without benefit of secondary treatment is being done under a special permit from the EPA, issued for five years beginning in 1985. The districts, she said, do not have the capacity to treat secondarily the total flow of sewage produced, and the expense of expanding the secondary treatment plant would be high.

The ocean outfall line, she said, extends into the sea for five miles, the last mile of which contains diffusion ports designed to dilute the sewage gradually with seawater. She said the agency, under the agreement with the EPA, is spending $1.2 million annually monitoring the ocean to determine that there are no adverse environmental effects. There’s the possibility that the EPA might not demand expansion of the secondary treatment plant.

An outside firm, Science Applications International Corp. of La Jolla, is under contract to do the monitoring. Orange County Sanitary Districts is the only agency in Southern California operating under an EPA special permit of this nature.

San Diego Bay, according to Fay, continues to have problems of water quality, apparently contributed to by the U.S. Navy. Further, a sewer outfall at Point Loma, with inadequately treated waste from the City of San Diego, has created an increasing abundance of coliform bacteria and caused declining distribution and abundance of kelp beds there. The biological condition of Mission Bay continues to deteriorate from periodic sewage spills, he said.

Newport Bay doesn’t fare well in Fay’s assessment. Increased development in the drainage area of the wetlands of Upper Newport Bay is threatening its integrity with pollutants. He also decries the sediment being discharged into the Upper Bay.

Fortunately, owing to a last ditch appeal last week by Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), Gov. George Deukmejian was convinced by her to keep in the state budget a $1-million appropriation for sediment control dredging of the Upper Bay. Also, a $250,000 loan to pay the county’s share of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ study of a proposed ocean outlet from a planned marina at Bolsa Chica remained in the budget.

Fay is worried about the management and future of the Bolsa Chica wetlands, which, he said, are vulnerable to planned development and conflicts with the marina over land use. He believes that if the ocean outlet is constructed it would cause “additional erosion problems downstream and exacerbate the already severe problems in Newport Beach.”

Huntington Harbour, he said, is not adequately protected from the input of sediments, and there’s a problem with what to do with the sediments to be dredged from the harbor.

Severe problems are facing the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors because of massive landfills proposed, intensifying reduced circulation and creating worse water quality problems.

Partial upgrading of waste treatment and disposal practices off the Palos Verdes Peninsula by Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts have resulted in notable restoration of kelp beds there, he said.

And so ends the inventory.