Ventura County Spill Pollution Called Unlikely

Extensive contamination from a sewage spill such as the one that forced the closure of 4 1/2 miles of San Diego County beaches is unlikely in Ventura County where waste is more thoroughly treated, officials and environmentalists said Thursday.

The waste water plant at Ormond Beach run by the city of Oxnard, which treats 17 million gallons of sewage a day, is the only facility in Ventura County that discharges its effluent into the ocean. Other cities discharge to rivers or creeks.

But in contrast to San Diego, where sewage is treated using what is called advanced primary treatment to remove most of the solid matter, Oxnard subjects its waste to a secondary treatment process.

That process removes all but a fraction of the solids from the waste before it is discharged a mile out to sea.

In addition, the city of Oxnard adds chlorine to reduce the amount of harmful bacterial and viral agents, thereby lessening the danger of illness to people who might come in contact with the treated waste.

Oxnard’s daily discharge is also a tenth that of San Diego, where since Sunday 180 million gallons a day have gushed from a broken pipe three-quarters of a mile offshore.

“Because of its size alone, Oxnard is one-tenth the problem that San Diego is,” said Robert Williamson, manager of community services at the Ventura County Environmental Health Department.

The spill in San Diego reached a crisis on Tuesday when engineers discovered ruptures in 19 sections of the 30-year-old pipe through which most of the county’s waste water flows. The nine-foot diameter conduit carries the effluent 2.2 miles out to sea to a depth of 220 feet.

While the amount of sewage spilled in San Diego is small in comparison to the amount discharged routinely in U.S. waters every day, environmentalists say flagrant incidents sharpen the public’s concern over marine pollution.

“Our perception on this is it’s comparable to what happened with the Exxon Valdez,” said Suzanne Iudicello, an attorney with the Center for Marine Conservation in Washington, D.C. “We have a highly visible spill in a highly visible place and it’s got everybody’s attention.”

The environmental damage from the spill, however, is expected to be short-lived.

John Grant, a marine biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game, said “a year from now, two years from now, you won’t know this happened.”

The spill highlights a years-long battle by environmentalists and regulatory agencies to upgrade coastal sewage treatment plants. In California alone, 40 discharge pipes, called sewage outfalls, pour hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage into the Pacific Ocean daily.

Mark Gold, staff environmental scientist with Heal The Bay, an organization that has fought for greater controls on sewage discharges in Santa Monica and elsewhere along the coast, said Oxnard’s plant is more efficiently run than the one in San Diego.

He said the San Diego facility is “one of the poorest run plants in the region.

“It’s a crime to only have primary treatment in these times,” said Gold. “There is no excuse.”

In the past, Gold’s organization has been critical of the Oxnard plant. Oxnard did not begin treating its waste at the full secondary level until after 1986, when it was ordered to do so by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Until that time, it had sought and received an exemption to the Clean Water Act that required the upgrades.

“With all the upgrades, they’re in good shape,” Williamson said.

Since 1986, Oxnard has used a secondary treatment process in which microorganisms called activated sludge are introduced into the sewage to digest and decompose the waste that does not settle to the bottom. Secondary treatment eliminates 10% to 15% of the suspended solids left after primary treatment.

Oxnard also is considering installing additional equipment to make the waste water clean enough to be reclaimed for municipal uses such as lawn watering.

Although the treatment plant may be upgraded, the Oxnard outfall pipe is aging.

The oldest sections of the pipe, which carries effluent from the city as well from Port Hueneme and four nearby military installations, are 40 years old.

The last 1,000 feet of the outfall pipe is less than 15 years old, said Robert Montgomery, environmental control manager of the city’s waste water division.

But, he said, the pipe is more stable and can last longer than San Diego’s because the offshore slope is more gradual, sinking to only 45 feet deep a mile from shore.

Montgomery said a team of divers inspects the pipe annually. He said it shows no signs of needing replacement.

Four years ago, divers found a six-inch hole in the pipe that leaked thousands of gallons of effluent, Montgomery said, adding that the effluent dispersed into the ocean and caused no environmental problems.

Williamson said that overall the city has done a good job of complying with regulations and preventing health hazards.

“But there have been breaks in the lines where we’ve had to go out and post beaches and take samples of the water,” he said.

Most other cities in the county treat their sewage to a higher level.

The city of Ventura, for example, renders its waste water clean enough that it can be discharged to the tidal pool at the mouth of the Santa Clara River near McGrath State Beach.

The treatment processes used by the cities of Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Camarillo also result in water clean enough to be put directly into creeks, before eventually flowing into the sea at Point Mugu.

But spills can and have happened at Ventura County’s treatment plants, usually in connection with storms.

In 1969, major flooding caused the city of Ventura’s treatment plant at Ventura Harbor to be inundated with raging water from the Santa Clara River. As a result, untreated sewage gushed into the harbor.

To prevent a repeat of that incident, Harbor Boulevard was built up to serve the joint purpose of both road and levee, removing the city’s treatment plant from the plain expected to be flooded by storms every 100 years, said Shelley Jones, community development director.

“We have certified to federal agencies that we are protected against 100-year storms,” Jones said.

But he said heavy back-to-back storms such as those of 1969 could have unforeseen effects. “Mother Nature does what she wants.”