COUNTY REPORT: Poisoning the Pacific : Beach Health Law Ignored, State Warns : County Says It Has No Obligation to Post Signs Because It Doesn’t Test Water

It starts with the heavy storms that come each year, washing fertilizer and pesticides from farmland, smashing sewer lines and unleashing rivers of raw sewage that roar down the creeks and into the ocean.

Month after month, the pollution builds--compounded by oil spills and even the occasional summer cloudburst--into a toxic stew of grease and oil, animal droppings and household trash flushed down city storm drains.

Sooner or later, it all ends up in the Pacific Ocean. And as the poison hits the beaches, the usual scenario involves local health authorities rushing into action--testing the seawater for pollution and posting the beaches with warning signs.

With one major exception--Ventura County.

The county’s environmental health division has ignored state health laws for years by failing to post warning signs on beaches during major sewage spills or other episodes of unsafe bacterial contamination, according to state officials.

“The public needs to be notified when there are problems,” said Jack McGurk, environmental manager of the California Health Services Department. “That’s the law.”

Although the state sets health standards for public beaches, McGurk said officials in Sacramento generally allow local health officers to determine when to warn the public about health risks. In this case though, McGurk said he is sufficiently concerned about Ventura County’s diligence that he plans to personally look into the matter.

“In a dire public health emergency, we can step in,” he said.

Defending their practices, Ventura County officials question whether the law really applies to them. They say they have no legal obligation to post warning signs on beaches because they do not test the waters for bacteria and thus have no way to determine whether the ocean is unfit for swimming.

“If we are going to warn the public, then we have to have some data,” said Donald Koepp, the county’s environmental health director. “We have to have a rationale. We cannot do that as an indiscriminate act.” As for collecting bacteria test data, he said, “We don’t have the resources.”

Some say they are startled by this see-no-evil approach in a county that takes such pride in its environmental purity.

“At a minimum, it is an ostrich-head-in-the-sand attitude,” said Neil Moyer, president of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County. “It’s beyond shameful, it is irresponsible because it is a public health issue.”

The situation also frustrates divers, swimmers and surfers who blame polluted waters for outbreaks of ear and sinus infections, skin rashes and flu-like ailments.

“Obviously, people want to stay out of the water when it’s not safe,” said Lawrence Manson of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal protection group. “It sure would be useful if the county would post the beaches.”

Progress Noted

Concerns about health threats to the estimated 4 million people who use Ventura County’s beaches each year is just part of the debate over whether the government should take stronger action to clean up ocean pollution.

After focusing for decades on the cleanup of effluent from big industry and sewage plants, government officials are now grappling with the toxic chemicals flushed from city streets and farm fields.

Overall, coastal waters are much cleaner than they were more than 20 years ago, when most of the county’s sewer plants routinely discharged partly treated sewage.

Local cities and sanitation districts have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 1972 to upgrade sewage-treatment plants, vastly improving their daily discharges as required by the federal Clean Water Act.

Now sewage moves through an extra step or two that reduces the pollutants to a tiny fraction of what they once were.

“It’s a dramatic improvement,” said Don Davis, a chemist at Ventura’s sewage treatment plant for 22 years.

And contaminants found in some near-shore species have fallen dramatically since the early 1970s, when the Food and Drug Administration was seizing shipments of bonito and other fish that were too tainted for interstate sale. Federal officials attribute the improvement to a ban on such poisons as DDT that stubbornly refuse to break down into harmless elements.

But sewage spills continue to occur.

“Sewage treatment plants are the environmental good guys,” said Dr. Gordon LaBedz, a UC Irvine medical professor and Surfrider adviser who studies water contamination and public health. “But the pipes that lead to the sewer plants, they can be a total nightmare.”

In addition to aging pipes and a lack of proper maintenance, officials say, sewer systems simply suffer from overload during big storms. When city streets flood, rainwater leaks into sewer lines through small holes in manhole covers. Collectively, these trickles can turn into a deluge, overwhelming the pipeline.

That scenario was responsible for numerous spills this winter across the county, as mounting pressure in the pipelines blew off manhole covers, forcing hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage to run down streets and then pour into storm drains on their way to the sea.

At the same time, the toxic load from urban runoff--a fetid mixture of automobile fluids, lawn chemicals and other pollutants--has increased steadily with urban development as the county has grown to more than 720,000 residents. If left unchecked, officials said, urban runoff could erode the gains made in the past few decades.

An average 78 million gallons of water a day flow from the county’s biggest waterways--the Ventura and Santa Clara rivers and Calleguas Creek. That swells to a torrent of 30 billion gallons a day during stormy weather. More runoff spills from the dozens of small creeks and storm drains.

And with that muddy flow come pesticides, weed killers and enough toxic substances to fill a chemistry textbook. Wildlife biologists worry about their long-term effects on fish, birds and marine mammals.

Many of the most virulent substances are a toxic legacy from decades of farming on the rich Oxnard Plain. Washed into coastal creeks, harbors and estuaries, the toxic substances cling to sediment and threaten the survival of rare shorebirds and other endangered species.

Although diminished over the years, traces of DDT and other outlawed pesticides continue to show up in fish tissue and in the brittle eggshells of the light-footed clapper rail, a local shorebird on the brink of extinction.

“The clapper rail is just a barometer of environmental health,” said Dick Zembal, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist closely monitoring the five remaining pairs of clapper rails at Mugu Lagoon. “DDT is an issue for all of the wildlife in the lagoon.”

DDT was banned nationally 23 years ago after it was fingered as the culprit thinning eggshells of pelicans nesting on Anacapa Island, 11 miles from Ventura County’s shoreline.

Newer brands of bug poisons and weed killers are also moving up the food chain. They get picked up by tiny shrimp and other bottom-dwelling creatures, which, in turn, are eaten by fish and birds.

The county’s increasing urban runoff adds even more poisons to the mix. One study found 160 toxic chemicals carried by runoff waters in storm drains, including cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls, known as PCBs and used as insulation in transformers, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, a suspected carcinogen that comes from incomplete gasoline combustion.

Nudged by the Clean Water Act, local officials are trying to contain urban pollutants before they expand with urban growth. The county’s population, nearly twice the size it was in 1970, is expected to double again within 45 years.

Authorities say this is a much tougher task than cracking down on industrial polluters and sewage treatment plants.

The solution, they say, will require altering human behavior. That means tracking the dog with a pooper-scooper, washing the car on the lawn, not the driveway, and no longer spraying pesticides to kill ants around the house.

“Everyone is going to have to help out,” said Alex Sheydayi, deputy public works director and the point man in the countywide program to educate the public about controlling urban pollution.

Compounding the problem is more than a century of man-made changes to the local landscape, including flood control projects built under Sheydayi’s direction.

Wetlands once covered large swaths of the county, replenished every winter as the Ventura and Santa Clara rivers spilled their banks and streams fanned out across the Oxnard Plain.

These wetlands acted as nature’s filters, slowing the pace of water so bacteria and aeration could break down pollutants before they reached the sea.

But most of the wetlands have disappeared over the years as farmers cleared and drained lands to grow crops.

In addition to the loss of wetlands, the explosion of housing developments in the 1950s and 1960s has increased pressure on flood control officials to build levees, deepen and straighten waterways and bury them beneath city streets.

All of that digging and straightening has paid off. With rare exception, floodwaters are now efficiently whisked to the sea. So too are the pollutants they carry.

On top of all this are the accidental oil spills into rivers and streams or directly into the ocean from wells near the coast or on offshore drilling platforms.

The 84,000 gallons of black crude that gushed into McGrath Lake and the ocean 18 months ago was just one recent reminder of the potential environmental devastation from an industry still haunted by the 1969 Union Oil Platform blowout that coated Ventura County beaches.

Adding to that anxiety is the Interior Department’s warning of a 94% chance of a catastrophic oil spill off Southern California within 30 years.

Sewage Spills

Dozens of reports of sewage spills caused by pipeline blockages, washouts and other mishaps are kept in three-ring binders at the county’s environmental health division. Each one was dutifully reported to county health officials, as required by state law.

But county officials rarely pass on this information to the public.

Only twice this year did they issue public advisories warning of the health risks: Once in January, when a swamped Thousand Oaks plant released 425,000 gallons of partly treated sewage into Arroyo Conejo; and once in March, after a 21-inch-wide pipe in central Thousand Oaks unleashed a 10-million-gallon spill.

The March 10 spill into the Arroyo Conejo, a tributary of Calleguas Creek, which flows into Mugu Lagoon and then out to sea, was the largest this year in Ventura County.

The second-largest was Jan. 10, when a 15-inch-wide line ruptured along San Antonio Creek, releasing an estimated 2 million gallons of raw sewage from Ojai. The creek feeds into the Ventura River and then dumps into the ocean.

Both spills involved aging sewage lines that were placed along creek beds to take advantage of the natural downward slope of land and thus avoid the need for pumps.

So far this year there have been at least a dozen major sewage spills, ranging from 2,500 to 2 million gallons, that never registered a response from health officials--even though officials elsewhere say they would have routinely triggered beach closures in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

The 2-million-gallon spill from the Ojai sewer main washout caused widespread concern when it was reported by The Times 10 days after the incident. The Times had received a tip from a resident who had seen the gushing spill. The sewage had traveled down the Ventura River to the ocean.

“When we notified the county, we believed our responsibility to notify the public was satisfied,” said Eric J. Oltmann, Ojai Sanitation’s general manager. “When that didn’t happen, we were astonished and then a bit embarrassed.”

Koepp said his office received the notification two days late and thus did not advise the public. “Several days had gone by so we felt there probably wasn’t a hazard. We made a judgment call.”

But, again without testing, Koepp issued a public warning about ocean waters five days after the Thousand Oaks sewer main rupture.

“If someone tells me they’ve dumped 10 million gallons of sewage,” he said, “I don’t need a certified lab and a biologist telling me there’s a problem.”

Koepp stopped short of actually posting warning signs, however. Records show that in addition to issuing few health advisories, Koepp’s office has not posted any warning signs on beaches since February, 1992.

And critics say the failure to do so is particularly questionable in instances where health advisories have been issued.

“If he makes the judgment that there is a health hazard, the law expects him to post the beach as closed,” said Michael Kiado, a senior sanitation engineer with the state Health Services Department.

Koepp, who sometimes calls lifeguards and local cities to advise them of sewage spills, said his division does not have to post warning signs on beaches because it has no money for testing and thus has no way to determine when ocean pollution exceeds state bathing standards.

Under California law, according to state officials, county public health officers are responsible for local ocean water testing as well as for posting beaches. Yet the law gives them the discretion of where and how often they must take ocean samples.

Last year, the county’s environmental health division asked the Board of Supervisors for $126,000 so it could resume a seawater testing program that was dropped in late 1978 after the passage of Proposition 13.

The board rejected the idea, and Koepp said he has no plans to renew the request this year.

State law on posting beaches, tightened in 1992, states that local health officers, after determining bacterial levels are a health hazard, “shall, at a minimum, post the beach with conspicuous warning signs to inform the public of the nature of the problem and the possibility of risk to public health.”

It gives local health officers leeway in determining when coastal waters are unsafe. But that discretion, state officials said, was not intended as a loophole to be used as a reason for not posting beaches when there are health risks.

“If Ventura County is not doing any posting at all, it flies in the face of the legislative intent,” said former state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), the author of the 1992 law.

After the law was toughened, Los Angeles County sought and won a ruling to have the state reimburse local health departments’ costs of posting warning signs on beaches. Health officers also get state dollars to defray the costs of reporting beach closure data to state officials, who are now required to compile an annual statewide report.

Ventura County has not sought such state funding because it has not posted warning signs in more than three years, said Bob Williamson, a manager in the environmental health division.

Nor has the county gone after cities or sewer districts responsible for major spills, as is done in other places. Orange County, for instance, collects $20,000 to $25,000 a year to reimburse costs, said Larry Honeybourne, an Orange County environmental health official.

Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties all follow similar protocol in safeguarding the public against potential health hazards on the beach.

The three counties post warning signs on beaches if sewage spills as small as a few hundred gallons reach the ocean. They routinely install warnings at the mouths of storm drains, creeks and other outlets after major rainstorms.

“We know from experience that every flowing storm drain can be a problem,” said Jack Petralia, Los Angeles County’s director of environmental protection.

Gary Stephany, environmental health director for San Diego County, said his office takes sewage spills very seriously. “We are required by law to protect the public health,” he said. “We close beaches and don’t open them back up until we get three days of clean samples.”

Even bankrupt Orange County has managed to piece together money to continue testing for bacteria, posting warning signs and operating its beach-closure telephone hot line for ocean swimmers and surfers and their concerned parents.

“We have to close beaches where there are sewage spills,” Honeybourne said. “That’s clearly what the statutes say.”

In addition to other Southern California counties, two Ventura County cities routinely test for ocean pollution. But Koepp’s environmental health division has never attempted to obtain the weekly bacteriological testing data from the Ventura and Oxnard public works departments, which test 21 spots along the beaches from the Ventura Marina to the Point Mugu Navy base.

Recently, state officials proposed that the county take advantage of those test results so it could warn the public when the waters are unsafe. But county officials told state officials they were reluctant to take on any extra duties, citing a manpower shortage. The proposal is on hold.

The state Health Services Department used to grant money to county environmental health departments, and closely monitored how they preserved the local environment. But McGurk, chief of the department’s environmental management branch, said all of those programs have been cut or spun off to other agencies.

And he believes the oversight of environmental health officers should now shift to county administrators and boards of supervisors. Failure to accept such responsibility could eventually expose Ventura County to costly lawsuits, he said.

“The duty of local health officials is to follow the law,” McGurk said. “If people became sick and the county wasn’t carrying out its responsibility, it could be found liable.”

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Pollution streams down Ventura County waterways. B2