Firms Exercise Damage Control

Catalina Offshore Products didn’t want its Japanese customers to get all their news about San Diego’s massive sewage spill from CNN.

So, just hours after the breaks in the outfall pipe were discovered, managers at the San Diego-based shellfish processing plant were working telephones and fax machines, calming Japanese customers who feared that San Diego County’s entire coast had been fouled.

The company continues to fax newspaper stories generated by the spill, which is dumping 180 million gallons of partially treated sewage into the Pacific each day. And even before county health officials acted, Catalina Offshore told local commercial divers that it wouldn’t accept any shellfish harvested near the spill.

The damage-control exercise is expensive but necessary, company officials said, because 95% of the sea urchins Catalina Offshore processes are shipped by air to the giant Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo.

“We’re trying to be as honest as we can with them because, over there, reputation is everything,” said Catalina Offshore executive Warren Hoffman. “When you have a bad reputation on the market, you don’t get as good a price.”

The spill reinforced the dramatic role man-made or natural disasters can have on the handful of San Diego-based companies whose economic success is driven by the Pacific Ocean.

San Diego’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry will avoid serious economic harm if the broken pipe is patched quickly, according to tourism officials. But the spill has already disrupted business for a few companies.

Possible damage to the kelp beds “is a concern of ours,” said Steve Zapoticzny, a spokesman for Kelco, a San Diego-based company that annually harvests more than 100,000 tons of kelp from state-owned beds stretching from San Diego to Monterey. Kelco extracts chemicals from the plant that are used for a variety of industrial applications.

Kelco’s marine biologists are “reviewing data with the city now as far as bacteria counts,” Zapoticzny said. “We’ll then sit back and evaluate things.”

Given diesel fuel and labor costs, it’s far more economical for Kelco to harvest kelp at beds off Point Loma than to send its ocean-going harvesting machines to beds that sit farther north, Zapoticzny said.

Should the spill and weather conditions keep Kelco from harvesting kelp, the company will do what it did in the early 1980s, after a fierce storm destroyed many kelp beds off Southern California. Then, Kelco imported kelp from other countries to keep its San Diego processing plant in operation.

The spill and bad weather have already taken a bite out of the bottom line at Catalina Offshore. If the ban on Point Loma shellfish remains in effect, the company’s supply of sea urchins could be reduced by as much as 30%.

Catalina Offshore now accepts only shellfish that have been harvested near La Jolla and San Clemente Island. The company is also paying an independent laboratory to check sea urchins for bacteria.

Point Loma’s and Imperial Beach’s kelp beds are “two prime sea urchin harvesting areas,” said Bob Shea, 58, a San Diego-based commercial diver who is the president of a group that represents professional divers.

The Point Loma beds are also readily accessible to some of San Diego’s 15 commercial divers whose boats aren’t powerful enough to make longer ocean journeys to untainted beds and reefs.

Some divers are shifting to kelp beds off La Jolla. But most are leery about diving near San Clemente Island, because reaching the island can take an entire day.

Some divers are giving serious thought to relocating their boats and harvesting sea urchins that grow near San Pedro, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Bodega Bay and Fort Bragg. But that isn’t an attractive option because “they don’t want to be gypsy divers,” Shea said. “They love San Diego . . . and their bread and butter is the Point Loma reef.”

John Ritenour, 62, known as the dean of San Diego’s commercial diving community, fears that the potential migration of San Diego-based divers to other ports will upset the already delicate environmental balance in waters to the north. “It’s just like having too many kids in the sandbox at one time,” he said. “You’re going to deplete the resource.”

While the short-term economic outlook is bleak for divers, marine biologists believe that the spill will have little noticeable long-term impact on the ocean environment. The ocean will heal itself if the string of storms ends and the city completes its $10-million repair job on the pipe, they say.

But Shea and other longtime divers who have watched a progression of problems--powerful storms that devastate the ocean floor, the little-understood El Nino and the impact of unrestrained poaching--aren’t so sure.

Divers have learned that it can take years for the ocean environment to return to normal after man or Mother Nature upsets the balance, Shea said.

They also fear that the spill will destroy their health.

Just weeks before the spill occurred, three local divers reported that they had developed intestinal problems after diving for sea urchins. One, who was forced to stop diving, has been told by his doctor that his problems are being caused by something in the ocean waters off Point Loma.

Another diver, who harvested sea urchins off La Jolla, said he saw evidence last Sunday that the spill was reaching farther north than had been reported.

“The water was a greenish, brownish color, which in his mind positively meant a sewage problem,” said Shea, who added that health officials have not seen any solid evidence that the spill had reached that far north.