Report of River Contamination Spurs Inquiry

An unexpected environmental controversy involving the Ventura County Fair has four state and county agencies looking into the question of whether somebody at the fair has been dumping horse manure into the Ventura River.

Officials weren’t panicking over the situation Thursday. For one thing, they weren’t sure how dangerous the situation might be. For another, they hadn’t yet found any horse droppings in the water.

An investigation was in the works, but the state and county agencies involved were approaching the situation with caution.

The horse manure issue was raised by a tipster Monday who reported to the California Coastal Commission that he had watched waste water gush for 15 minutes from a fairground drainpipe into the environmentally sensitive Ventura River estuary.

The man told the Coastal Commission that he believed the discharge to be animal waste from the nearby horse corrals at the fairgrounds, Commission Planner Virginia Johnson said.

The same man called the Ventura County Environmental Health Department on Tuesday, officials there said.

Those calls set the bureaucratic ball rolling. Calls went next to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles, which has jurisdiction over state waterways, and the California Fish and Game Commission.

By late Thursday, however, no agency had taken samples of the water where the manure may have been dumped.

“We want to do some testing,” said Robert Williamson, manager of community services with the county Environmental Health Department. It is difficult to determine whether water has been contaminated four days after the alleged dumping, he said. “But we haven’t had guidance from the regional board yet.”

He said there is a slight, if any, threat to human health from contact with the estuary, whether it contains horse manure or not.

However, Shirley Birosik, environmental specialist at the regional water board, said investigators will test the water early next week.

Fair officials were adamant that fair employees could not have dumped manure anywhere that could have caused river pollution.

The discharge running into the Ventura River is harmless waste water from washing down the paved streets at the fairgrounds, Assistant Fairgrounds Manager Arthur J. Amelio said.

Amelio conceded that the amount of discharge might seem like a lot to the average citizen because it had backed up for a month due to a broken pump at the fair. But he insisted that it posed no danger.

When the pump was fixed on Monday, crews pumped out the pool of water, estimated by fairgrounds officials to be about 600 gallons.

“I know what’s happening with all the animal sewage because we pay big bucks to take care of that,” Amelio said. Most animal waste is shoveled into wheelbarrows and taken away to be used for manure, he said.

Reed Smith, hazardous spill coordinator for the California Fish and Game Commission, said a large concentration of discharge containing animal waste could hurt the aquatic life in the river. If the bacteria use the available oxygen in the river to break down the fecal matter, the fish would suffer, he said.

But, if as Amelio contends, only the occasional dropping from a horse or other livestock makes its way into the storm drain, it would present no more problems than the waste of any wild animals who live upstream from the river’s mouth, Smith said.

He said, however, that state fish and game investigators regularly bring cases against dairy farmers who allow their animals’ waste to run into state rivers. And he said the horse manure question will be fully investigated.

“But it doesn’t sound like this is going to be one of our hotter cases,” he said.