Whoa! Horses Causing Beach Bacteria?

The ivy-covered homes amid the cottonwoods and eucalyptus of Sullivan and Mandeville canyons hardly look like pollution factories. In this section of Los Angeles, above Sunset Boulevard between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, Rolls-Royces and Jaguars glide along the streets. Gardeners tend the landscaping. Gates shield the privacy of well-known, well-heeled residents.

But state and county inspectors contend that this part of town shelters the culprits responsible for unsafe bacteria levels on Santa Monica beaches.

The circumstantial evidence includes bridle paths along the canyons’ winding roads, rustic wooden signs advising, “Watch for Children and Horses,” a bag of Sweet PDZ Horse Stall Refresher leaning against a split-rail fence.

The canyons are the center of the West Los Angeles horse-riding country. Nearly every backyard in the canyons and in nearby neighborhoods boasts a stable. And waste produced by the horses apparently is making its way to the sea along concrete-lined channels leading to the large Santa Monica Canyon storm drain and possibly the Pico Avenue-Kenter Avenue storm drain as well, according to officials with the county health department and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Both drains end at the beach, sending runoff flowing in open creeks across the sand into Santa Monica Bay.

In June, City Councilman Marvin Braude asked city sanitation workers to test samples of water taken near the drains. The results showed levels of coliform as high as 9,400 bacteria per 100 milliliters of water, far higher than the limit of 1,000 bacteria considered safe by state regulators.

In late July, although there had been no reports of illness caused by contaminated water, the county posted signs at both storm drains warning swimmers at Santa Monica and Will Rogers State Beach to avoid the surf within 25 yards.

Over the past month, a couple of hikes along the storm drain channel and several water samples have convinced state water quality inspectors that the horses in the area are the source of the high bacteria counts.

John Lewis, a state water resource control engineer, said he sampled water in early August at the end of the Santa Monica Canyon channel, which empties onto the beach at Chautauqua Avenue. The total coliform level was 16,000; the fecal coliform level 5,400.

He followed the channel to a spot where it splits into two branches: One from Sullivan Canyon and one from adjacent Mandeville Canyon. Coliform readings from each tributary were so high that state-issue instruments, which stop at 24,000, could not measure them. The fecal coliform level for Sullivan Canyon was 1,300; for Mandeville Canyon 5,400, Lewis said.

He is arranging for crews to take samples soon in the Pico-Kenter drain, a more complicated undertaking because the channel runs underground. But he suspects that horse stables above Sunset Boulevard also are responsible for some of the waste in the Pico-Kenter drain.

“A lot of the corrals are built into hillsides,” Lewis said. “It’s just obvious that when it rains, the water runs across the yard directly downhill. And the storm channel is the only drainage facility in the area.”

Agree With Assessment

County health officials say they concur with that assessment. Last month, they served notices of violation to seven properties where manure was improperly handled.

In one case, a pipe on the property had broken and the leaking water was running across the stable, washing manure into the drain channel, said Bob Snow, chief environmental health officer for the county health department’s west district. In another case, manure was piled at the edge of the storm drain channel.

“We’re doing some more testing,” said Jack Petralia, director of the health department’s bureau of environmental protection. After the testing is over, he said, the department will try to make a decision on what to do with the violators.

Among the options officials are considering are educating residents on proper waste disposal--more frequent inspections and more frequent cleaning of the storm drain channels. Lewis said he suspects that some residents keep more horses than are allowed by zoning and “we could ask the city to enforce that ordinance.”

Residents Disagree

But the residents are not so sure that their mounts are to blame for the possible hazard along the shore, about three miles away. Estimates of the number of horses in the area range from 100 to several hundred. That simply isn’t enough to foul the storm drain channel, neighbors say.

“I don’t know if anyone figured the volume of horse manure,” said Eric Mayer, a white-haired, mustachioed man standing one sunny morning beside a Rolls-Royce in the brick courtyard of his canyon home. “It would seem to me that there’s not enough to pollute the ocean. Otherwise, we’d be knee-deep in flies. You don’t see a lot of flies around here.”

“They’re trying to blame it on us, but that’s a crock,” said Sandy Henning, who boards her thoroughbred in Mandeville Canyon. “I’ve ridden on the stream there. It’s not deep enough. It doesn’t flow enough to take anything with it.”

Horses have been a tradition in the canyons for more than 50 years. Cliff May, the prominent architect, said riding was a neighborhood pastime when he moved to Sullivan Canyon in 1935. He said the first horses had been a gift to a canyon resident from the emperor of Japan.

Fewer Horses

Equestrian events at the 1932 Olympic Games were held in and around the canyon, neighbors said. But in recent years, they said, the number of horses in the area has declined. Homeowners got rid of their mounts when the children grew up or sold their houses to nonriders.

“I can’t believe it,” said Frances Watt, a 14-year resident who keeps two horses at her Sullivan Canyon home. “For years and years, the horse population was even larger than it is now. Why would it become a problem all of a sudden?”

The answer, Lewis said, is simply that nobody checked the storm drain levels before. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a problem,” he said.

Braude’s office asked for the tests after spending a year discussing ways to end the open flows across the beach, according to Tom Brady, the councilman’s deputy. Brady said he had believed that sending the runoff through pipelines into the bay would solve the problem because the contaminated water would be diluted in the ocean. But the latest results show that in the surf near the drains, “there are still some problems with the water,” Brady said.

But he said he thinks there is more to the fecal bacteria pollution than the canyon horses, but he isn’t sure what. “I certainly don’t doubt that that’s one of the sources,” he said. But, he added, “it would be nice to do some more testing before we start pointing fingers.”