Pollution Hearing Held as Beach Is Closed

He didn’t intend it that way, but state Sen. Charles M. Calderon could not have picked a more apt location to conduct a public hearing on coastal pollution.

As the legislator collected testimony Wednesday about a pair of dramatic beach closings this summer, Los Angeles County health officials were closing a two-mile stretch of beach just minutes away from the hearing site.

Santa Monica and county officials traced Wednesday’s spill to a collapsed sewer that allowed effluent to flow into a storm drain. The beach was expected to remain closed from Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica south to Windward Avenue in Venice until tests on water samples show that bacteria in the water is within acceptable levels, officials said.

The purpose of Calderon’s hearing Wednesday at the Joslyn Park Center was to determine what can be done to prevent such occurrences. The legislator did not know of the new spill even as the hearing wound through four hours of testimony.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Toxics and Public Safety Management, Calderon (D-Whittier) called the fact-finding session in response to two pollution-triggered beach closures--one in mid-August, the other during the Labor Day weekend--near the Ballona Creek outfall.

“Two weeks after the latest incident on Labor Day weekend, we still do not have any firm answers about what has happened,” Calderon said.

Testimony from city and county public works officials did little to clear up the mystery Wednesday. Untreated sewage in storm drains often results from illegal dumping and accidental sewer line breaks at construction sites, they said. But tracking down the source is sometimes impossible because of the immensity of the system. Ballona Creek, for example, is the receptacle for a 100-mile network of drains that covers 127 square miles and extends from Hollywood to South Los Angeles.

Keeping the outfalls free of sewage is essential to preserving Southern California’s way of life and vital to the economy, Calderon said. He noted that of 2,000 beach closures across the nation last year, 588 were in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

Local environmentalists, who noted the absence of a plan to identify and regulatethe source of pollutants, nevertheless praised a new warning system implemented in Los Angeles County in February that sets up guidelines for beach closings when high levels of toxins are present. That system was used during Wednesday’s Santa Monica spill.

But the environmentalists criticized the state Department of Health Services for gutting a bill that would have imposed similar guidelines statewide. Mark Gold, staff scientist with the environmental group Heal the Bay, accused the department of overstating the estimated $7-million price tag on the measure, assuring that it would be watered down by a cost-conscious Legislature.

He also rapped the department for insisting that it has no evidence of a relationship between illnesses in swimmers and their proximity to storm drain outfalls--despite never conducting an epidemiological study on the issue.

“No one’s even looked,” Gold said. “To me that’s irresponsible.”

Harvey Collins, deputy director for environmental health for the state agency, countered that the department is open to exploring the possibility of conducting such studies. He stressed, however, that the agency’s role is not to close beaches, but to set guidelines that localities can follow.