FROM SEWER TO SHINING SEA : Let No Sludge Go to Waste, or What’s a Government Loophole For?

Everybody is talking about sewage. Nothing gets a conversation rolling like the mention of activated sludge--especially when the beaches are closed on the hottest days of the year. Nobody gets into loud arguments about sewage the way they do when you bring up the subject of Woody Allen, though, because most people pretty much know where they stand on sewage: firmly opposed to it.

One organization that doesn’t much like to discuss sewage, surprisingly enough, is the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Clean Water Act by once again declining to comply with the Clean Water Act. The sanitation districts do like to invoke Section 301 (h) of the Clean Water Act, which implies that you can dump poorly treated sewage straight into the ocean . . . if you ask the EPA nicely enough. The sanitation districts have always had impeccable manners, unless you happen to be a fish, or eat fish, or surf down current of the outfall pipe. (It’s not the districts’ lapses that caused the beaches to close this summer, but they add to the general filth.)

The operation that the sanitation districts perform on the sewage, a sort of screening and settling, goes by the impressive name of “advanced primary treatment,” although, according to one scientist I talked to, “advanced primary treatment” means roughly this: Nothing actually floats. About a year and a half ago, the EPA finally denied the 301 (h) waiver, and ordered the districts to clean up its act, to step up to full secondary treatment, as the city of Los Angeles had a few years before. The districts became suddenly impolite. The United States and the state of California sued, and the sanitation districts have spent millions in public funds to lobby against the suit. In its infinite wisdom, the law has discouraged rich and poor alike from eating what they catch off of piers.

The county claims it needs to be able to dump new, primary-treated sewage to cover up all the icky old sewage, presumably until the entire Santa Monica Bay is silted up and we can ride our bicycles from Redondo Beach to Catalina. This will be bad for the owners of oceanfront property but may well increase the acreage available to the men and women who grow arugula for the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. My bet is, the developers are all for it.

Environmental laws weren’t always even this strict: The bay’s bottom is actually fouled with DDT and PCBs, also heavy metals--not old Blue Oyster Cult records, but cadmium, lead, arsenic, things like that, from the days before “Silent Spring.” Pretty much all scientists not directly on the districts’ payroll, though--not to mention the dying starfish and sea urchins--agree that pouring extra sewage into the ocean, hoping that some of it falls right on top of the old sewage, is not unlike trying to eradicate your Visa debt by paying it off with your MasterCard. (Many observers are reminded of the old sign in downtown Casmalia, a Santa Barbara County town famous for a fine, old steak restaurant and one of the biggest toxic waste dumps in the western United States, now closed. The sign said, “Toxic Waste: It’s a Resource.”)

Section 301 (h), however, is pretty useful as a metaphor, as in the colorful folk expressions “up 301 (h) creek without a paddle” or “when the 301 (h) hits the fan.” If you don’t keep your eyes on the ball, the government will pull you down into the 301 (h) every time.

An official of another sanitation district, in a piece on the Times op-ed page last summer, claimed that his sewage outfall was “teeming with marine life and resembles an underwater reef.” Ummm . . . 301 (h).

The presidential candidate who attempts to distract your attention from his shifty draft record by pretending that he and the missus are really running for mom and dad: 301 (h). Or picture the Administration official, working in the West Wing past midnight, who discovers that most of the 1980s increase in average pretax income went to households that were already making $300,000 a year. He redoubles his efforts to lower the capital gains tax and make those people even richer in the cynical hope that some of that money will eventually make its way to their employees. It’s classic 301 (h). Why do you think they call it “trickle-down economics”?