Public Is Asked to Help Decide Future of Sewage Treatment

The Orange County Sanitation Districts have begun a major public information campaign to help settle an environmentally sensitive question:

Should the districts, which provide sewage treatment to 1.2 million residents--or 87% of the county’s population--improve sewage treatment or seek a second waiver of the national Clean Water Act, which would allow continued ocean dumping of waste water treated to less than full standards?

To improve sewage treatment levels as required by the Clean Water Act, the district would have to build new facilities capable of removing the bulk of virus- and bacteria-carrying solid particles from the waste water. While that may preserve ocean water quality, it also would skyrocket sewage costs and residential fees, possibly “three to four times,” district officials said. Customers now pay an average of about $60 per year for sewage treatment.

The sanitation districts’ current waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expires in 1990, but the district must apply for a new waiver by the fall of 1989.

“We have until October, 1989, to make the decision,” said Gary Robbins, a consultant whose Berkeley firm, Urban Alternatives, was hired by the districts to help organize the campaign. “Until that time, we will be holding seminars, workshops and public hearings to gather public opinion,” he said.

Dumping Controversial

Such waivers of treatment standards for effluent dumped into the ocean have been controversial along the California coast. In such areas as southern Orange County and northern San Diego County, sanitation districts have abandoned applications for EPA waivers after citizens’ groups raised concerns about pollution of offshore waters.

Public workshops on the issue are scheduled for September and will be followed by preliminary environmental and engineering alternatives in November, Robbins said. Public opinion surveys are expected to circulate well before public hearings on alternatives by the sanitation districts’ officials in April, 1989, he said.

In fact, $4.5 million already has been allocated by the nine districts that make up the sanitation districts, headquartered in Fountain Valley, to conduct one of the most comprehensive studies in the country involving waste water treatment, said J. Wayne Sylvester, general manager for the sanitation districts.

“This is no small undertaking,” Sylvester said, adding that even “without building any secondary treatment facilities,” the districts’ capital budget for the next 10 years is an estimated $1.5 billion.

The sanitation districts serve 23 cities in central and northwestern Orange County.

Sewage Treated

According to federal law, sanitation treatment agencies must subject raw sewage to both primary and secondary treatment processes before dumping the water into the ocean, unless they can prove that primary treatment alone is sufficient and qualify for a waiver.

Such a waiver was granted by the EPA in 1985, when it issued the Orange County Sanitation Districts a permit. The permit must be renewed every five years, however.

That waiver requires the districts to remove 75% of solid matter in the effluent before it can be sent through a sewage outfall about five miles off Huntington Beach at a depth of 200 feet. The federal Clean Water Act standards call for removal of 85% of the so-called “suspended solids,” particles that can carry bacteria or viruses, among other pollutants. In addition, the waste must be neither too acidic nor too alkaline and must have a PH level of between 6 and 9.

Primary treatment removes solids through screening and sedimentation, sanitation officials said. The agency has contended that its treatment level is sufficient to ensure ocean water quality.

“We had reams and reams of evidence supporting our position by many, many scientists when we applied for our waiver,” said Don E. Smith, chairman of the sanitation districts board.

But the waiver process, according to California’s Sierra Club, fails to measure the cumulative effects of dumping waste water into the ocean, said Sheri Tonn, a professor of chemistry at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and the Sierra Club’s spokeswoman on water conservation.

In the Northwest, Tonn said, the director of EPA discontinued its permit process after Puget Sound became polluted.

“The permit process . . . (doesn’t) measure the sporadic discharge and its effect on the sediment layer. It’s the Sierra Club’s position that the marine waivers fail to demonstrate that (such discharges are safe),” Tonn said.

Estimates for conversion to secondary treatment facilities are being studied in Orange County by an engineering firm, but figures on total costs are not yet available, Sylvester said.

However, sanitation district officials said that San Diego, which has a comparable population to Orange County, recently spent about $1.2 billion to add secondary treatment facilities.

The added costs may be inevitable, environmentalists and regulatory agencies contend, in view of fines for illegal dumping and the need to eventually find an alternative to dumping wastes in the ocean.

Recently, the city of Los Angeles, as part of a settlement to a 10-year-old lawsuit against the city by the EPA and the state of California, agreed not to dump any more sludge into the Pacific Ocean. The sludge is produced at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant near El Segundo.

$625,000 Fine

The city agreed to pay a $625,000 fine for past violations and subjects the city to future fines for any future ocean dumping into the polluted Santa Monica Bay.

In the face of opposition from south Orange County residents in 1985, both the Aliso Water Management Agency and the South East Regional Reclamation Authority withdrew waiver applications for their outfalls off Aliso Beach and Dana Point.

“The longer we wait, the more it costs to convert to secondary (treatment facilities),” said Janice Hashimoto, chief of the oceans and estuary section for the EPA in San Francisco.

“If you look into the future, there will be a time when secondary treatment of waste water of course will be necessary. The reason is that every area is growing so quickly and, unlike what we knew in the past, the ocean does not have an infinite capacity to accept effluent.”

Sylvester said the question local sanitation districts are faced with is: “At what level do we want our sewage clean?”

“We can make it drinking-water safe, but we have no evidence to conclude that more (purity) is necessarily better,” Sylvester said.

Hashimoto noted that in the last decade, the federal Clean Water Act has been amended several times. “With each amendment, the act becomes more restrictive,” she said, adding that Congress failed to put a limit on how long waivers will be granted.

“It’s unclear how long we can continue (granting waivers).”