Graphic Reminder to Humans: Gutters Aren’t Garbage Dumps : Environment: Heal the Bay spreads the message that storm drains lead to the sea. A fish skeleton gets the point across.

Adi Liberman’s recent tour of the storm drains of Los Angeles was an eye-opening and distressing experience.

“There were cans of paint, open, half-full, with paint spilling out,” said Liberman, executive director of the environmental group Heal the Bay. “I thought if paint got in, it was from somebody washing out their paintbrush.

“I left the storm drains feeling depressed at what we are up against.”

Heal the Bay, a watchdog group that has been fighting to clean up the Santa Monica Bay since 1985, is working with the city of Los Angeles to develop a public education program designed to stop people from equating a gutter opening with a trash can.

At the center of the campaign is a stencil design whose purpose is to heighten awareness that storm drains lead to the sea. The design features a fish skeleton that is part of the Heal the Bay insignia, a wavy line representing the ocean and the words “No Dumping--This Drains to Ocean.” It will eventually be sprayed onto every storm drain opening in Los Angeles County.

Chuck Ellis, who heads the city’s storm-drain education effort, drove a van carrying 10 people working on the campaign through some of the tunnels that make up the underground drainage system to give them a feel for the problem.

They saw bottles oozing household chemicals, twisted shopping carts, car batteries and hundreds of tennis balls. They saw debris and loot from the recent riots--charred wood, tennis shoes with price tags still attached, and several hand-held scanners that had been taken from supermarket checkout stands.

They saw mysterious pipes--pipes that don’t appear on any city map--spewing liquid from an unknown source and blackening the walls with chemical residues.

Gutter openings below cul-de-sacs were especially defiled, piled with trash, some neatly tied in plastic bags, motor-oil stains fanning out to the floor.

Normally, the liquid brew drains slowly out to sea, but when the first big storm comes along, the backed-up garden clippings, animal droppings and larger debris flush out into the ocean without so much as a good screening.

“That’s why our beaches look like a landfill every time it rains,” said Mark Gold, Heal the Bay’s staff scientist.

For most of the people on the tour, it was their first up-close encounter with the labyrinth of pipes and tunnels.

Heal the Bay has been working on a storm-drain education plan for two years, including designing the stencil. And now some money is available to get the program rolling.

The money, $950,000, comes from Los Angeles as part of a settlement of a long-running suit brought against the city by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for discharging sludge and untreated sewage into the bay during rainstorms.

The settlement was reached in 1987, and the city set aside the money at that time. The start of the education program was delayed, however, because state laws governing storm-drain runoff were then on the verge of enactment. Those laws are now in effect.

As part of the settlement, Los Angeles also agreed to upgrade the Hyperion Treatment Plant and stop dumping sludge into the ocean.

Legally obligated to finance the storm-drain education program for two years, the city is making a virtue of necessity. It has enlisted Heal the Bay as an unpaid consultant and is negotiating contracts with media specialists.

Heal the Bay officials say they hope that once Los Angeles starts putting a spray can to the stencil design, other cities--many of them also under legal pressure to reduce pollution from storm drains--will follow suit. Several cities, including Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach, have already indicated that they want to adopt a stencil program, Gold said.

Organizers hope to outline the campaign as soon as possible to take advantage of community groups formed to help rebuild after the riots. They will also target traditional community groups, such as the Boy Scouts, to help spray the design and spread its message.

So how will they go about teaching people as far away as East Los Angeles that the beach starts at their gutter?

According to Ellis, it is a monumental problem comparable in scope to the “Keep America Beautiful” anti-litter message of the ‘60s and the “Buckle Up” message of the ‘80s. Both campaigns cost millions of dollars and took several years to have any effect.

“People’s behavior changes, but it changes slowly,” Ellis said. “You just have to keep reintroducing the message. . . . It’s a heck of a lot more complicated than a press conference and a few door hangers.”

The campaign group is pinning a lot of hopes on the stencil design, an idea that has been employed elsewhere, such as Chesapeake Bay. A salmon design, for another example, graces storm-drain openings in Portland, Ore., Gold said.

The chosen design for Los Angeles evolved over a two-year period. Graphic artists from companies such as KCBS News and Chiat/Day/Mojo advertising agency donated time and energy to the design.

Los Angeles paid for a series of focus groups across the county to gauge what design elements would be the most effective.

Latino groups, for example, argued successfully that the words no tire basura (no dumping) should be stricken from the design, saying it unfairly singled out Spanish-speaking people. Other groups recommended imposing a fine to give the message some teeth. Some cities may add fine information, but the basic design will remain constant throughout the county.

Other components of the campaign may include a gutter patrol that would enlist neighborhood groups to report trash-filled gutters that need to be swept out before it rains.

Los Angeles and other cities will be encouraged to pass laws that would limit sediment runoff from construction sites and influence developers to send runoff into landscaped areas or over porous concrete. This would allow runoff to filter into the ground instead of down the gutter, carrying dissolved pollutants with it.

One bright spot in the war against storm-drain pollution is the recent completion of a project by Santa Monica and Los Angeles to divert runoff from the Pico-Kenter storm drain to the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey.

Heal the Bay deems the diversion, which began in May, a success. Bacterial and chemical levels have been lowered at the outlet where Pico Boulevard ends, turning what was an “F” beach in Heal the Bay parlance into an “A” beach.

But during storms, the Hyperion plant cannot handle the extra water. Plus, other, larger storm drains empty into the bay.

Why should everyone be concerned about clean beaches when there are other pressing problems such as unemployment and crime?

“We don’t have the great parks that cities like New York have,” Liberman said. “You need places where you can go and experience the natural world. The beaches are the best place we have to offer.”