Sanitation Board Opposes EPA Sewage Order

A Los Angeles County Sanitation District board voted Wednesday to oppose a recent federal directive ordering the construction of a $200-million secondary sewage treatment facility to protect marine life off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Over protests of environmentalists, the board voted 11 to 1 to renew an application for a waiver from the ruling, made several weeks ago by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Board member Wallace Edgerton, representing Long Beach where he sits on the City Council, cast the lone dissenting vote.

District spokesman Joe Haworth said that the EPA will be notified in the next 10 days of the board’s action. He added that the district may be granted up to a year to revise the waiver attempt that was turned down last month.

The EPA had issued the treatment order based partly on evidence that marine life about two miles off the Palos Verdes Peninsula had been harmed by sewage sediment that had received only primary treatment. An estimated 41,000 tons of the sediment move through the end of the sewer pipe each year, according to officials.

The district board’s action followed a staff recommendation to reapply for the waiver on grounds that the sediment was helping to build layer upon layer of a protective shield of sorts over DDT deposits that had been dumped in the area decades ago.

But marine biologist Rimmon C. Fay, who has been a leader in pressuring the City of Los Angeles to clean up Santa Monica Bay, told the sanitation district board that it was a “poor rationale” to discharge inadequately treated sewage to keep DDT covered.

Also opposing the board’s action was Nancy Taylor of the Sierra Club’s Clean Coastal Waters Task Force and Dorothy Green, a leader in the organization called Heal the Bay, which like Fay is working to clean up Santa Monica Bay.