Sewage Spill Puts Damper on Beach Action

Fun was in short supply Wednesday at Santa Monica’s Playland Arcade, four days after a massive sewage spill that closed all beaches along the Los Angeles coastline.

Rows of video games stood silent. The change attendant read a newspaper. Owner George Gordon sat in a back room of the cavernous arcade, near the base of the Santa Monica Pier, watching television--and wondering where his customers had gone.

“I don’t know if it’s the sewage, the stock market or the weather,” Gordon, 74, said as a light rain fell intermittently outside. “Any adverse thing draws people away. It’s slower every day.”

The normally slow winter season reached an unusually low ebb for merchants and beachgoers as poor weather persisted and more than 50 miles of Los Angeles coastline--from Malibu to Long Beach--remained off limits because of Saturday’s sewage overflow.

The spill, blamed on heavy rains, was the largest in the last two years, according to county health officials, dumping an estimated 4.1 million gallons of raw sewage into the ocean near the city’s decaying Hyperion sewage treatment plant.

A separate spill in Orange County, resulting from a broken pipeline Saturday in Fullerton, also left a one-mile stretch of Seal Beach closed Wednesday as health officials in the two counties ran bacterial studies to determine when beaches will reopen.

Beaches were to to remain closed today, pending test results from monitoring stations all along the coast. If those tests show excessive bacteria readings--or if further rain causes additional sewage overflows--beaches could remain closed into the weekend, officials said.

“Ordinarily the levels clean out in a couple of days,” said Steve Stewart, a spokesman for Los Angeles County’s Department of Health Services. But in tests conducted Monday morning, Stewart said, county officials were surprised to see that levels from the Saturday spill were still above state water quality standards.

“They were unexpectedly high,” he said of the contamination readings. “There are a lot of possible factors in that--tides, currents, all kinds of things.”

On Wednesday, meanwhile, beaches were left largely to sea gulls and surfers who took their chances with light rain and sewage contamination.

North of the Santa Monica Pier, a vast expanse of beach was dotted only by birds and trash cans. At the Hermosa Beach Pier, the waters were empty. A blackboard announced: “Ocean Closed . . . CAUTION, 4 million gallon sewage spill.”

In other places, however, the waves were simply too good to pass up.

“It was really epic this morning . . . real good, solid six-foot swells,” said Ken Seino, 31, an avid surfer and manager of Natural Progression Surfboards in Malibu. “A lot of guys were calling it the best Malibu has been in five years, as far as shape and size go.”

Seino estimated that 200 surfers filled the waters during the morning high tide, with fewer numbers surfing in the afternoon. Seino has gone five times since Saturday’s spill, he said.

Surfers are aware of the possible risks, he said, but “when there are good waves, Malibu is hard to beat. Some people will actually risk their health to go out there.”

During a past sewage spill, Seino said, two surfers got gamma globulin shots--to guard against disease or infections--and took to the waters. Surfers sometimes talk about the problem between rides, particularly when they see what appears to be solid sewage material or oil, he said.

“When you see this stuff floating around, you can’t help but get angry,” he said. “But you have to be out there anyway.”

In the South Bay, there were fewer surfers, but they were just as dedicated.

Seth Gilman, 21, a USC business student from Venice, said he had considered the pollution but decided to go surfing anyway in Manhattan Beach. “Something is going to get you sooner or later, so have fun now,” he said.

“It’s not funky (hazardous) out here today,” said Jim Karr, 36, a painting contractor from Redondo Beach. “Then again, I might turn green and die tomorrow.”

Lifeguard Jon Stahl, 24, of Manhattan Beach said he has spent the week ashore, warning other surfers and swimmers to stay out of the water. But, as soon as warning signs come down, he is taking to the waves again--whether or not there remains a danger.

“Hopefully,” he said, “my immune system will kick butt.”

This week’s closures were the second time this year that the entire Los Angeles shoreline has been shut down. A similar closure, lasting four days, occurred after 2.7 million gallons of sewage were dumped on Oct. 23, said Jack Petralia, the county’s acting director of environmental health.

Four times this year smaller sections of beach have been closed--twice at Cabrillo Beach near San Pedro and twice at Will Rogers State Beach near Pacific Palisades, he said.

“Anytime we have a prolonged rain like we did last Saturday . . . I would expect a sewage spill,” Petralia said. “I just sat at home Saturday waiting for the phone call telling me it had (spilled). It definitely wasn’t a surprise.”

Trudy Smart, manager of the Manhattan Beach Chamber of Commerce, feared the repeated closures, if they continue, could hurt property values on the coast.

“Something has to be done to clean up the water out there,” she said. “It sounds like (we’re living in) a Third World country.”

But on Wednesday, spokesmen for Mayor Tom Bradley said steps have been taken to solve at least some of the problem, the smaller spills resulting from the failure of sewage pumps. Such failures were blamed for the spills in San Pedro and Pacific Palisades.

Six backup generators will be installed at several locations in the huge sewage system to prevent those failures, a Bradley spokesman said. They will be installed during the next two weeks.