Cleaner but Not Clean : Tainted Urban Runoff Remains Key Threat to Santa Monica Bay

The show was “The Edge,” an MTV-esque television magazine production by the British Broadcasting Corp. The topic was “Baywatch,” a runaway hit in England. The scene: Santa Monica in late July. The statements: outrageous.

“Santa Monica Bay, with the most polluted beaches in the entire world,” intoned a well-coiffed anchorman in tank top and very un-British tan. Scantily clad “Baywatch” actors, he continued, face grave dangers as they gambol in the surf while shooting their scenes. “Here we are to talk to Mark Gold.”

“And here I was in the unique position of being Santa Monica Bay defender, saying, ‘Jeez, compared to English beaches, at least we treat our sewage,’ ” said Gold, staff scientist at the environmental group Heal the Bay. “The English press is saying that our beaches are the most polluted in the entire world. No wonder tourism is down.”

Visits to Los Angeles County beaches have dropped 56% since their peak in 1983--even though population and tourism to the area have increased. The largest number of visitors are Southern California day-trippers, and two-thirds of them, according to a public opinion poll, believe that the bay is polluted. Most say they won’t swim in it.

Cautious? Yes they are. Too cautious? Maybe not. Although Santa Monica Bay has been scrutinized for decades, science still cannot answer the single most crucial question about the placid curve of ocean that starts at the Ventura County line and ends at the tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula: Is it safe to swim here?

Some things are known. Santa Monica Bay is cleaner--but not clean. Most major single sources of pollution have been remedied--but not all. Poisoned runoff from storm drain systems that cover hundreds of urban square miles still pours into the surf.

The Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, a public-private coalition that conducted the bay poll, has just released the draft of a massive plan to push this part of the Pacific toward cleanliness, complete with a very rough price tag of more than $1 billion.

Although the plan offers solutions for a variety of problems, the greatest attention is paid to urban runoff, widely believed to be the bay’s worst threat. The plan calls for increased study of the bay and its pollution sources, greater enforcement and public education.

But can the bay ever get any cleaner than it is right now? Quite possibly not. If it does, improvement is sure to take decades.

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Most of the money needed to upgrade Santa Monica Bay would have to come from strapped local governments--at a time when environmental programs nationwide are competing for scarce money with other priorities such as health care and police protection.

“It seems to me that this society should protect its pristine waterways like the Santa Monica Bay,” said John Froines, a professor of toxicology at the UCLA School of Public Health and lead scientist in a recent study investigating toxic pollution from urban runoff. But “my sense is that in a time of extreme budget crisis one can argue that it’s not the highest priority.”

It is not that the bay has not gotten attention--especially this summer. Carol Browner, chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, stood on a bridge over Ballona Creek last month stumping for a stronger federal Clean Water Act that “would go a long way toward helping to clean up Santa Monica Bay. . . . We’ve just got to clean up this bay.”

The same week, two environmental organizations sued cities and companies that have ignored the few storm drain regulations on the books. And settlement negotiations are nearing an end to force the County Sanitation Districts to upgrade the Carson sewage treatment plant--which environmentalists contend has violated the federal Clean Water Act for 14 years.

Since the first pipeline began draining raw sewage into the bay in 1894, the demands of a growing population and industrial base have outstripped the abilities of science and engineering to keep the bay clean.

From 1942 to 1947, a 10-mile strip of sand from Hermosa Beach to Venice was quarantined because of sewage contamination and soaring bacteria levels. Until 1972, Montrose Chemical Corp. regularly dumped the carcinogenic pesticide DDT off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Even now it shows up in the flesh of the white croaker, which sportfishermen are warned not to eat.

Highlights in the march toward cleanliness have largely occurred in the last five years:

* Under a court order, the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant is being rapidly upgraded and should reach the desired level of sewage treatment by 1998. The plant stopped dumping sewage sludge into the bay in 1987.

* This year, Chevron USA Products Co. agreed to stop its daily dumping of treated refinery waste water less than 100 yards off El Segundo, which will remove the last major source of industrial pollution in the swimming areas of the bay.

* The Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, in its most recent report, said concentrations of most contaminants from treated waste water flowing into the bay have declined dramatically.

“I know what’s going on, and I go diving in Santa Monica Bay and think absolutely nothing about doing it,” said Jeffrey Cross, director of the coastal project. “I wouldn’t go swimming after a rainstorm. But the rest of the time I have no personal problem with swimming or diving.’

Cross, however, is in the minority. In a 1992 survey of 500 Los Angeles County adults, the restoration project found that 41% do not visit Santa Monica Bay. The top three reasons: “The water is polluted.” “The water is dirty.” “I might get sick if I swim in the water.”

Most of those who visit have their own quirky rituals about how to stay safe. Lifeguard and surfer Abby Balderas ditches the surf “if it tastes bad or smells bad.” Tyrone Gammage of Ontario tells his sons Tyrone II, 8, and Garfield, 6, to “just wade out chest high and not swallow the water.”

Brigitte Frescas of Century City, a nanny who brings her charges to the beach regularly, has a more drastic remedy. “It’s dirty, it’s polluted,” she said. “I don’t go in the water.”

Robert Sulnick, executive director of the American Oceans Campaign, contends that the major threat to the bay comes from toxic contamination. This month, his group released a comprehensive study of toxic contaminants found in urban runoff, an investigation carried out by scientists at the UCLA School of Public Health and funded in part by the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project.

The study found that an estimated 160 toxic chemicals--many known or suspected carcinogens--flow into the bay daily through storm drains that capture urban runoff, causing potential danger to humans and marine life. In dry weather, the system delivers 25 million gallons a day of untreated runoff into the bay; in rainy weather that flow can reach 10 billion gallons.

But the study raised as many questions as it answered. It identified carcinogens such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, also known as PAHs, which are the byproducts of incomplete combustion, and PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, which come from transformers.

It did not trail the chemicals to their sources--a complex and perhaps impossible task--nor did it identify all the toxic substances coming from the drains or discuss their effects on human health.

Toxic substances are not the only problem to plague the storm drain system, which runs thousands of miles, collects contaminated water from hundreds of sources and is the site of illegal dumping.

Urban runoff also contributes bacteria and viruses to the bay, pathogens that may pose risks to swimmers and waders. The sources of the bacteria and viruses--some of which come from human excrement--are unknown. The storm drain and sewer systems are not connected; it is speculated the pathogens come from illegal dumping, sewer leaks, homeless people and animals.

Two years ago, a new permit system was begun, requiring industries and municipalities to create storm drain management plans and use so-called best management practices to clean up runoff.

But in July, Heal the Bay and the Natural Resources Defense Council started legal action against 12 industries, six cities (not including Los Angeles) and the California Department of Transportation, charging that they had ignored the permit process. At the time, the groups estimated that of the 10,000 industries affected by the regulation, only 2,000 had begun working toward compliance.

“In our experience, review and oversight is lacking,” said Gary Hildebrand, a civil engineer with the County Department of Public Works, who works on the municipal storm drain permit program. “You don’t know how well these people are meeting their standards. . . . It’s up to the Los Angeles Regional Quality Control Board to ensure that; there’s a lot of doubt about whether they’re doing their job.”

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Dick Harris, the board’s assistant executive officer, said the program is so new that a lot of small cities have not signed on. Then there are the financial constraints of a badly strained economy. “We only had one guy working on this for a year and a half,” Harris said. “Then we got another guy.”

Many of the best management practices to clean up the storm drain system are not structural remedies such as treatment plants, but instead require a change in human behavior, Hildebrand said.

“It’s going to take many years,” he said. “Like recycling, you’re not going to get people to change quickly.”

Also going against the bay’s chances for a rapid recovery is a lack of basic knowledge. Many important questions about the body of water have not even been asked. In addition to the restoration plan, the coalition is readying an exhaustive state of the bay report, which characterizes possible sources of pollution and health effects from swimming and fishing.

But for all its charts and maps and discussions of the effects on people, the companion report is larded with statements of the following stripe: “Very few studies have attempted to link human illness with chemical contamination of marine waters.” “It has been difficult to quantify the kinds and amounts of total contamination.” “May be,” “appear to be,” ’is not known” and “probably” are common phrases.

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Regulators and environmentalists describe the cleanup plan as being ambitious and a necessary beginning for the bay. Catherine Tyrrell, director of the restoration project, notes that the cleanup plan is just a draft and that the financial component is being written.

One other large missing link is the lack of any system to report on water quality.

A UCLA geochemist says she may be within striking distance of creating a real-time test to measure water in the very early morning and say within hours whether bacterial levels are low enough for swimmers to use the beaches without fear. The tests now in use take days to reach the same conclusion. Neither current nor planned test mechanisms addresses toxic substances.

M. Indira Venkatesan, whose research on 5,000-year-old whale excrement in Antarctica led her to the water quality test, is investigating whether coprostanol--a chemical compound found in the fecal matter of humans and some animals--can be used to indicate whether the bay is safe for swimming.

She says the initial research will take about a year; if her hypotheses pan out, streamlining the process could take another year.

“What surprises me is that although the people know the seriousness of environmental problems, the money is not coming to do the research that is directly related to environmental concerns,” Venkatesan said. “That bothers me.”

Bay Watch

Visits to county beaches peaked at 79 million in 1983 but have dropped 56% since then, according to the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project. The restoration project links declining tourism with concerns about pollution. While most of the single sources of pollution have been remedied, a network of storm drains still spews untreated water into the bay and is considered the remaining major source of pollution. The map shows the major drains, as well as two natural drains, Malibu Lagoon and Ballona Creek.

* 1. Malibu Lagoon 2. Pulga Canyon storm drain 3. Santa Monica Canyon storm drain 4. Santa Monica Pier storm drain 5. Pico-Kenter storm drain 6. Ashland Avenue storm drain 7. Ballona Creek 8. Imperial Highway storm drain 9. Herondo storm drain 10. Redondo Pier storm drain

* Problems:

* The Carson sewage treatment plant, run by the County Sanitation Districts, is in negotations over court action to be upgraded.

* More than 60 storm drains deposit untreated runoff into the bay. Studies have shown contamination from toxic chemicals and human sewage.

* Solutions:

* The Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant will be fully upgraded by 1998.

* The Pico-Kenter storm drain in Santa Monica has been diverted, causing the greatest single improvement in a beach.

* Chevron has agreed to move the outfall pipe that dumps treated waste water from its El Segundo refinery out of the surf zone.

* Source: Heal the Bay