Can the Santa Ana River Be Revived? : Environment: The EPA says polluted waterway should be cleaned up. State and local officials say that’s unrealistic.

Paved, drained, dammed and polluted to the point where it is barely recognizable as a stream, the Santa Ana River has long been more a source of ridicule than recreation, more of a waste pit than a resource.

Now Southern California’s largest river is suffering its greatest identity crisis. The federal government and the state are caught in a feud over how to treat a natural resource so radically altered that no one even knows what to call it: Is it a river, or is it a human waste stream?

How the issue is resolved will determine whether millions of dollars, perhaps even billions, should be spent to clean up toxic pollutants and turn the Santa Ana River into a waterway where aquatic life can thrive and people can safely fish.

“We have a body of water out there that’s been so modified by man, it is an artificial environment,” said Doug Drury, a manager of the Chino Basin Municipal Water District, which discharges treated sewage into the river. “Now its biggest function is to carry urban runoff. It will never be back to the natural stream it once was.”

The debate over the long-besieged river, which meanders from the mountains to the ocean through San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties, heated up last year when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed the river on its national list of toxic rivers.

Inclusion on that list means the Santa Ana must be cleaned up to meet the same pollution standards that apply to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite’s Merced River and every other waterway in the nation.

The federal Clean Water Act says all waterways must be kept “fishable and swimmable.” Based on that, the EPA says the Santa Ana River’s cadmium, lead, mercury, silver, chromium and copper--toxic metals that tend to accumulate in fish--violate stringent federal standards.

Four waste water treatment plants operated by the cities of San Bernardino, Riverside, Colton and Rialto and two regional plants in Chino were identified as the source of the materials. The EPA wants the chemicals, which are flushed down drains by industries and households, reduced by the treatment plants to barely detectable amounts.

But state officials say the federal government is reading the law too literally for a river that is no longer really a river at all, but a man-made waste stream. The bulk of its flow is made up of the 100 million gallons of treated sewage that pours daily into the river in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

It’s crazy, they say, to spend so much money trying to get the Santa Ana River to meet the same standards as a pure mountain stream. Household sewer rates, they say, would skyrocket to pay for the cleaner water, so they are urging the EPA this month to consider a compromise that could result in less stringent toxic limits.

“For a river to be fishable, is it necessary to have the water-quality standards that the feds are trying to apply?” asked Gerard Thibeault, executive officer of the Santa Ana-based Regional Water Quality Control Board, the agency in Riverside that enforces state water pollution laws. “If you want an eastern Sierra trout stream, the answer is yes. If, on the other hand, you have a warm-water body that’s essentially waste water, the answer may be no.”

All this controversy surrounds a river that many Southern Californians do not even realize carries enough water to argue over. Most see the river only as they drive by its dry concrete conduits on the freeway or race down a bike trail that parallels its course.

But the much-maligned Santa Ana is sort of the Nile of Southern California, mined for its drinking water, gravel and even its energy.

Before settlers arrived in Southern California, during wet years the river wound a 100-mile course from the San Bernardino Mountains to the sea off Huntington Beach. Steelhead and salmon swam up its mouth to spawn.

For the last few decades, however, that pristine scenario has been hard to imagine. From its source to its mouth, it has been altered, beginning almost 100 years ago when hydroelectric power plants were built in the mountains to capture much of its flow.

A network of dams, wells and collection ponds have diverted the rest of its natural water, originally to farm fields and now to suburban households in the three counties.

The only portion that still resembles a stream is a willow-lined, 25-mile stretch from Imperial Highway in Yorba Linda to Riverside. But the water there is not natural, either: It is created by the treated sewage of about 2 million people. This is the main area of state-EPA dispute.

In Anaheim, the river essentially ceases to exist, because all its flow is drained into Orange County’s aquifers. The water seeps down into the soil, which filters out the pollutants, then enters the underground lake that supplies about 70% of the county’s drinking water.

From Anaheim to the ocean, all that remains of the river is a concrete ditch carrying murky urban runoff and storm water.

State water-quality officials say if it were not for the millions of gallons of disinfected waste water discharged daily, there would not be a Santa Ana River except in the mountains.

But EPA officials in San Francisco maintain that the Santa Ana is still a river as long as there is water of some kind. “From our perspective, it is a river,” said Laura Tom, chief of point-source monitoring in the EPA’s western regional office.

“It has aquatic life,” she said, “and there are beneficial uses to the Santa Ana River other than dumping effluent into it. And we’re going to protect it.”

A few hardy varieties of fish swim in the river between Riverside and Yorba Linda, including catfish, Santa Ana suckers, even some bass. Fishing is not popular, although people occasionally drop a line there. The river is often used for swimming on hot summer days in Corona and Norco, despite posted health warnings.

EPA officials worry that the tissues of the fish might be loaded with toxic metals. Although it probably will not harm people, minuscule amounts of metal in the water can poison fish and other aquatic life.

The Santa Ana is the only Southern California waterway on the EPA’s Short List, which contains toxic rivers and lakes where there are identifiable sources of the pollution. Also included are 14 Northern California streams--mainly small, rural ones with rustic names like Little Grizzly and West Squaw Creek.

Because the Santa Ana has so little natural water left, it poses an unusual dilemma for the EPA. Just a few other streams in Arizona raise similar problems.

“Lots of times Congress forgets there is a western difference when they write a law,” Tom said. “It is a very different area out here, semiarid with very low flows. That’s why . . . we’re trying to be flexible, because we realize this is California.”

Since last year, when the river appeared on the national list, contentious letters have been exchanged by the EPA and the regional water board.

The federal agency asked the water board to come up with cleanup plans by April for the waste water plants.

The state agency’s response: Do it yourself. Since the agency does not hold a cleanup to be worthwhile, it does not want to devote the time of hard-pressed staff members to it.

State water-quality officials and waste water plant operators are not saying the river is not worth saving. They agree that more needs to be done to protect it, but they also urge the EPA to be realistic about its value.

National standards for waterways allow just a few drops of a toxic metal in every billion or trillion drops of water--a requirement that river water be cleaner than drinking water.

“It’s appropriate to meet the highest level of protection for the river’s beneficial uses without overwhelming economic and social impacts,” Thibeault said. “But the key there is overwhelming . The point is, you don’t need to set standards that will protect eastern Sierra brown trout in the Santa Ana River.”

This month, a compromise has begun to emerge.

The waste water plants have proposed a $700,000 study of the river to see what its realistic recreational uses are and what amounts of metals the fish can handle.

The study, the first of its kind, could persuade the EPA to accept special standards for the river.

EPA officials have not yet acted on the proposal, but said they are receptive. “It’s definitely a step forward, and we support the process,” said Maria Rea, an environmental protection specialist in the EPA’s regional water-quality standards section. “It may very well be that the national standards may not apply to the Santa Ana River,”

But, Rea warned, it is a gamble that may backfire. The study could conclude that even more stringent standards are needed.

Operators of the sewage plants say it is worth the risk because they do not have any idea how they can get waste water as clean as the nation’s rivers are supposed to be.

Just one plant in the nation has the technology to make sewage that clean: the Orange County Water District’s $21-million Water Factory 21 in Fountain Valley, which turns waste into water safe enough to inject into the county’s ground-water basin.

It would take six of those plants to clean up the river’s waste water, Drury said.

Meeting the EPA standards would increase residential sewer bills in Riverside and San Bernardino counties fivefold, to an average of about $50 a month, said Joseph Grindstaff, city waste water systems manager for Riverside.

Over a five-year period in Riverside alone, compliance could cost $350 million, he said.

It might be cheaper to build a 50-mile pipeline to ship the effluent directly from the sewage plants to Anaheim, where it is captured to feed the county’s aquifers, he said. Then there would not be anything to argue about, because the river would cease to exist.

But no one is advocating the demise of the river, which is crucial for wildlife because it is one of the region’s last remaining large stretches of fresh water habitat.

And state water quality officials and operators of waste water plants agree that more needs to be done to protect the Santa Ana.

Grindstaff of Riverside said if the EPA relaxes the standards for the river, they can probably be achieved with much less expense. For example, silver can be reduced if city inspectors ensure that dentists’ offices and film-processing laboratories are not dumping residues down their drains.

“I don’t honestly believe the river is toxic to fish,” Grindstaff said. “But there are thousands and thousands of birds that use the river, and I think that is a beneficial use that is worth protecting.”

At Chino Hills State Park, rangers hope that the river will be safe and attractive for varied new and improved recreational uses planned there, including hiking, camping, fishing and equestrian trails.

“As far as our role, we do want to see it cleaned up,” said Ron Schafer, district superintendent for the state parks department. “I don’t think heavy metals are healthy in any natural environment.”

Neil Underhill, supervising park ranger at Featherly Regional Park, said if the river was not polluted, fish could be stocked there for the park’s campers.

“The Santa Ana River should be quite picturesque, with all that running water flowing through the park,” he said. “The only problem is, it’s brown.”

TROUBLED WATERS

The Santa Ana River, which runs 100 miles from the San Bernardino Mountains to the ocean off Huntington Beach, has been included on the EPA’s list of toxic rivers targeted for cleanup. Because most of its length has been dammed and drained, the only segment that actually resembles a stream is between Riverside and Yorba Linda, and that’s because it contains millions of gallons of treated sewage discharged daily. Six wastewater plants emit toxic metals that exceed federal pollution standards. State officials urge the EPA to set more realistic limits because getting the man-made waste stream to comply with federal law would cost millions.

1) CHINO HILLS STATE PARK: Rangers hope to see the river cleaned up so they can eventually expand recreational uses, including campgrounds, equestrian and bike trails and fishing spots.

2) YORBA REGIONAL PARK: The Santa Ana River bike trail starts up here and continues the entire length of the river to the ocean.

3) FEATHERLY REGIONAL PARK: People hike and ride horses in the river area of this campground, but swimming is banned. This area is also a home to bobcats, coyotes and other wildlife.

4) RIVER ROAD: This is a popular summertime swimming spot for Norco-area residents, although health officials warn that bacteria levels pose a health risk. Some people also fish around this area.

5) PRADO BASIN: This jungle-like riparian habitat is home to many forms of wildlife, including small endangered birds called least Bell’s vireos.

6) PRADO DAM: After a 1938 flood along the river wiped out bridges and roads in Orange County, this dam was built to stem its flow during storms.

Waste-water Plant Locations

A) CHINO: 16400 El Prado Road

B) CHINO: 8555 Archibald Ave. (in Cucamonga)

C) RIVERSIDE: 5950 Acorn St.

D) RIALTO: 501 E. Santa Ana (in Bloomington)

E) COLTON: 1201 S. Rancho Ave.

F) SAN BERNARDINO: 299 Bloodbank Road