SEWAGE: Scripps Takes Different Tack on Outfall

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography has objected to a proposed sewage-treatment plant in Sorrento Valley because the plant might include an ocean outfall pipe that would discharge treated waste water near a relatively pristine tract of ocean close to the prestigious institution.

“It is vital to our operation” that nearby ocean waters “remain natural and unpolluted,” Scripps Director Edward A. Frieman wrote in an April letter to San Diego sewage treatment officials detailing the institution’s concerns about an encroachment in an area Scripps scientists have used for research projects for almost 70 years.

Some environmentalists say that Frieman’s objection to the Sorrento Valley pipe contradicts claims made by individual Scripps scientists that the treated waste water pumped out through a Point Loma outfall pipe is actually a healthy addition to the ocean.

A Back-Yard Issue

Frieman’s letter, for example, has drawn fire from Richard McManus, a Cardiff resident who in 1986 formed People for a Clean Ocean, a citizens’ group that supports secondary sewage treatment for waste water pumped into the ocean.

McManus on Thursday charged that Scripps “took a stand” on the growing controversy over pumping treated sewage into the ocean only because “it was in their own back yard.”

But Scripps “won’t make a stand” in the ongoing debate over whether the Point Loma sewage treatment plant, which now offers advanced primary treatment, should be forced to add multibillion-dollar secondary treatment technology for San Diego’s sewage, McManus said.

In response, Frieman said that Scripps has intentionally remained neutral in the debate over the need for secondary treatment at Point Loma. Those Scripps scientists who have publicly opposed secondary treatment as expensive and unnecessary “have chosen to speak out as citizens, which they have an absolutely perfect right to do,” Frieman said. “But, by in large,” he said, “Scripps does not take positions on political issues.”

Frieman said his letter “was referring to pollution as anything that would cause a change in the state of that mass of water. . . . But I wasn’t speaking of pollution in the negative sense . . . in terms of whether (an outfall) would produce harmful bacteria or pollution in that sense.”

Frieman on Thursday maintained that his letter was driven by researchers’ fears that an ocean outfall pipe would hinder Scripps’ research in nearby ocean water that has remained relatively free of man-made intrusions since the institution was founded in 1929. “We’ve got some of the longest continuous records that I know about anywhere in California,” Frieman said.

‘An Issue of Context’

Frieman suggested that McManus might have been misled by the letter, which was not intended to address the controversy over secondary treatment at Point Loma.

“Maybe it wasn’t the best choice of words,” said Frieman, who maintained that the letter did not attempt to address political questions generated by debate over the need for secondary treatment the federal Environmental Protection Agency has required of San Diego.

“It’s an issue of context,” Frieman said. “I was speaking in the research context, not in the context of a societal or political issue.”

“They’re backstepping and sidestepping,” McManus complained. With the proposed Sorrento Valley sewage treatment plant, he said, “they took the position that, yes, there is an impact from these outfalls.” Frieman said, continued McManus, that “we don’t want one in our back yard.”

Frieman also wrote that a proposed outfall pipe north of Scripps’ La Jolla campus would adversely affect the quality of nearly 2 million gallons of sea water that Scripps and the nearby Southwest Marine Fisheries center pump each day into laboratories and aquariums.

“The water must be as pure and unpolluted as possible to ensure the health of the marine life we keep” in those facilities, according to Frieman’s letter.

Scripps scientists have argued that water quality and marine life at the mouth of the Point Loma outfall pipe would not benefit from the expensive secondary treatment equipment now required by the EPA. The scientists maintain the Point Loma plant’s advanced primary treatment is sufficiently protecting the ocean, and that federal regulators should grant San Diego an exemption from the expensive secondary treatment requirement.

Scripps’ concern over the location of a nearby outfall pipe has fallen off dramatically since April because the city plan calls for construction of a pipeline that would carry treated waste water from Sorrento Valley directly to Point Loma, where it would be released through an existing outfall pipe.

Fallback Plan

The Sorrento Valley plant was included in a recently unveiled, $2.5-billion city plan that includes construction of six satellite treatment plants that would reclaim waste water for use in watering landscaped areas. Only not used for watering projects would be pumped into the ocean.

Although the city would prefer to pipe excess effluent to the Point Loma plant, a fallback plan calls for construction of a pipe extending into the ocean from a point to the north of Scripps’ waterfront grounds.

Under the fallback plan, the outfall pipe would be several miles to the north of the research area. But ocean currents and the ocean floor’s topography would combine to carry effluent into the research area, according to Frieman’s letter.

Ocean currents have kept treated sewage from existing outfall pipes in San Diego County away from research instruments situated in the “Scripps Coastal Reserve” that extends a mile out to sea from the Scripps campus. The reserve extends south to include the La Jolla Underwater Park.

Frieman wrote the letter to express researchers’ concern that the introduction of treated sewage would affect Scripps’ physical, chemical and biological research into the marine environment.

‘Obvious Hypocrisy’

Although Frieman defended his letter, Paul Dayton, a marine ecologist at Scripps who has argued against the need for secondary treatment at Point Loma, acknowledged that “on the face of it, there seems to be an obvious hypocrisy.”

“It sounds hypocritical, but this is the only area in Southern California where there’s not a pipe real close by,” Dayton said. “It gets to be a societal question of whether (the coastal reserve) has a value to society that exceeds” the costs of protecting it from the impact of an ocean outfall.

“There is a sense in California that the (waters offshore from Scripps) should be protected against encroachment,” said Edward Goldberg, a highly regarded Scripps scientist who has opposed upgrading Point Loma’s treatment plant to include secondary treatment.

“What we have here are the best scientific and technical information available,” Goldberg said. “We transfer that to those who create and make public policy. We’re not politicians, we’re scientists.”