Environmentalist Searches for a Safe Harbor : Jay Powell Takes On a Daunting Task, but the Tide May Be With Him

She has a mouth but no voice. Jay Powell wants to be her spokesman.

She has a body but no way to protect herself. Jay Powell wants to be her bodyguard.

The lady is San Diego Bay, an 18-square-mile crescent of salt water that is the geographic fulcrum for the county. She has launched men to war, escorted them back to grateful families, carried fishermen to work and played host to the bobbing masts of yachts and pleasure boats.

Refugee From Earth Day

And he is one of San Diego’s best-known environmentalists, a refugee from Earth Day who has fought in the guerrilla wars against Big Oil, nuclear power plants, San Diego Gas & Electric and local developers. He thinks like a professor and drives like a flower child, tooling around town in a noisy, reworked ’64 Volkswagen van.

Together, they are a good match: a local waterway suffering from pollution and a doting big brother who wants to make it right.

“I’ve talked to a number of people in the last few months,” said Powell, special projects director of the nonprofit Environmental Health Coalition. “This one guy said, ‘I want to swim in the bay someday.’ He wasn’t confident that he could do that right now.

“There’s this public uncertainty about this waterway that’s ours,” Powell said. “We want to restore their confidence in their ability to use their water, our water.”

No small task, to be sure. Yet this time it seems that the odds are with Powell, who is no stranger to quixotic causes.

For example, a stirring of recent regulatory fervor by the state Regional Water Quality Control Board has produced a number of cleanup orders and administrative fines against companies caught dumping toxics--PCBs, metals, paint chips--into the bay. Last week, the water board took the unprecedented step of naming the San Diego Unified Port District as a co-contributor in a celebrated case of copper pollution near one of the public agency’s National City leaseholds.

First Comprehensive Report

In addition, Assemblywoman Lucy Killea (D-San Diego) has spearheaded a drive to bring together all of the regulatory agencies responsible to swap information about pollution and health problems. After a year of discussions, the interagency panel is about to release its first comprehensive report on the status of the bay.

But the interest still lags behind the problem, and recent studies and regulatory cases underscore the high-tech pollution that is bedeviling San Diego’s preeminent waterway.

A November report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that in sampling at various sites around the nation--including in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle--San Diego Bay ranked No. 1 for arsenic and copper. The tests, taken between 1984 and ‘87, also show that San Diego among the highest for PCBs and zinc.

At the northern curl of the bay, in Commercial Basin, scientists have found elevated levels of tributyltin, a potent biocide added to marine paint to kill off barnacles and other organisms that attach themselves to boat hulls.

The basin, where ship painting operations line the water near North Harbor Drive, has also logged high levels of PCBs and metals, according to the most recent studies published by the state mussel watch program.

A short drive along Harbor Drive to the east, Convair Lagoon remains closed behind a chain-link fence and ominous signs warning of contaminated water. “Fish and shellfish from these water may contain harmful chemicals. Do not eat,” says one.

Variety of Culprits

The culprits: a variety of metals and carcinogenic PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, the man-made fluids that were used in transformers and capacitors. Last year, the regional water board fined Teledyne Ryan $75,000 and ordered the company to clean up the PCBs, which were presumably dumped years back into the aeronautical firm’s storm drains.

At the site of the new waterfront convention center downtown, the bay is being threatened by a huge plume of underground fuel now hampering redevelopment. The 450,000-gallon reservoir--Powell has dubbed it “The Blob”--was thought at one time to be slouching toward the bay, but redevelopment officials now say it has been stopped.

Farther south, there is more to fret about.

A 1987 study showed that sediment taken from three places--including the 28th Street operations of National Steel & Shipbuilding Co.--has high concentrations of zinc, lead, PCBs and copper.

The combination was so unhealthy that the San Diego sediment samples were more effective in killing off sea animals called amphipods in laboratory tests than samples taken from bays in Los Angeles and Orange County, according to the study by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project Authority, a nonprofit scientific organization in Long Beach.

And, at the 24th Street Marine Terminal in National City, copper continues to leak into the bay from Port District-owned storm drains. The contaminant is a holdover from Paco Terminals, an ore-loading business that was fined $50,000 by the regional board last year for the pollution.

Monumental Copper Cleanup

The board decided last week that the Port District, Paco’s landlord, was just as culpable as its tenant in allowing the pollution. Now, both the company and the port face a monumental copper cleanup that one estimate puts as high as $180 million.

Despite the roll call of so-called pollution “hot spots,” Powell says he’s optimistic that there is a chance to make good on the ideals embodied in the federal Clean Water Act, which calls for the cleansing of the nation’s rivers and lakes.

“We’ve got a chance to take them up on that,” Powell said. “OK, let’s commit the resources and do what we have to do.”

The bay is the latest in a string of ecological causes that have involved the soft-spoken, bespectacled Powell.

The 43-year-old native of the San Fernando Valley said he became fascinated with environmental causes after he was discharged from the Navy in 1971. He gravitated to central Arizona, where he worked for half a year on an 800-acre model city before launching his “back to the Earth phase” by moving to Julian to tend his garden and help restore buildings. After four years, he took off for Mt. Laguna to construct a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail and settled later in Cardiff, where he heard about something called the San Onofre nuclear power plant.

“That was kind of the beginning of activism for me,” Powell said of his introduction to a grass-roots group called the Community Energy Action Network. “The more I studied, the more I got my teeth into the issue--the cover-ups--the more intrigued I became.”

Only the Beginning

Nuclear-plant bashing was only the beginning. There was Jerry Brown’s 1978 gubernatorial campaign, the statewide initiative to tax oil company profits, the fight against SDG&E;’s plans for its Southwest Power Link and the successful battle against offshore oil drilling.

In 1981, Powell became conservation coordinator for the local Sierra Club chapter, which saw its membership rolls balloon in reaction to the policies of the Reagan Administration. The group achieved political respectability when it provided crucial support to then-Mayor Roger Hedgecock in 1983.

The high point, however, came in 1985, while a beleaguered Hedgecock was struggling under felony indictments for fraud and perjury. Powell helped rally other environmentalists to win a stunning victory over well-heeled developers with the passage of Proposition A, the citizens initiative that effectively shut out construction from the city’s 52,000-acre urban reserve.

The victory galvanized slow-growth sentiment in the city, particularly north of Interstate 8, and it was a proper note for Powell’s exit in mid-1986 to work with a San Francisco group dedicated to preserving open space.

But when he came back, the political winds had shifted dramatically. San Diego voters handed environmentalists a major blow by defeating a number of growth-control measures on the 1988 ballot.

Powell, who pitched in during the waning days of the campaign, said environmentalists had “fractionalized” on the growth issues--some worried only about protecting environmentally sensitive lands while others took a hard line on building caps.

That schism, plus a “daunting” number of growth and insurance proposals on the ballot, spelled doom for the slow-growth forces, which are now quietly regrouping, he said.

Yet Powell said there have been a number of significant victories in the past two years. Environmentalists helped defeat plans for the San Diego Energy Recovery Project trash-to-energy plant and Pamo Dam. The San Diego City Council has decided to pursue secondary sewage treatment. Voters put in place district-only City Council elections, a move that environmentalists believe will help their cause.

Environmentalists cannot be ignored, he said. “I think there’s more of a recognition that that constituency needs to be consulted and involved in decisions by elected officials and agencies.”

And that is exactly what Powell has in mind for the bay. He had the Environmental Health Coalition charter a boat recently to take staff members of Mayor Maureen O’Connor on a tour of the bay to point out the problem areas. He’s met with county Supervisor Brian Bilbray’s staff about waterfront pollution.

He’s also become a fixture at regional water board meetings, taking the podium repeatedly to prod in his understated way for quicker and more severe action against polluters.

Take, for instance, local boatyards, some of which have recently run afoul of the regional board for allowing paint chips and sandblast material to fall into the water.

“Some people say, ‘How the hell can you expect these guys to run a clean operation? If you have boats, you are going to have pollution.’ I don’t buy that,” Powell said on a recent day while driving around the bay in his van.

“The crap’s going into the water and they know it is going on. . . . They need to keep the paint chips out of the water. If you don’t, it gets into the food chain.”

Powell said he was particularly put out when the regional board recently fined Southwest Marine $15,000 for allowing raw sewage and sandblast residue to fall directly into the water. The firm was eligible for a $40,000 assessment.

However, going after bayside dischargers is only part of the story, Powell says. He applauds plans by regulators to find out what is in the urban runoff that empties through storm drains into the waterway, especially from the large pipe sticking into the bay from under Laurel Street downtown. Eventually, the campaign to restore the bay could include a homeowner miles away with an itch to dump old pesticides and paint in the sewers.

Ideally, Powell said, he would like to see the kind of “Save the Bay” campaign in San Diego that was so successful during the 1970s in San Francisco. To that end, he is preparing a slide show about the waterway and is hoping to pull off some sort of “public celebration” of the beleaguered bay.

“Sometimes, you think of it as just this thing that gets used in our industrial back yard,” Powell said.

He wants to reverse that and inject a sense of pride about the new lady in his life. He wants everyone to see her as an “ecosystem that’s been a gift to the area that we can share and have industries depend on.”

“Heightened consciousness of the bay, that’s what we’re shooting for.”