Nature’s Assault on Water Resources Can’t Compare to Man’s

Last year, various prognosticators forecasted dire threats and destruction from El Nino-driven weather. Instead, Ventura County’s waterways, wetlands, shoreline and other water resources have been under unremitting and relentless assault from unconscionable events perpetrated by local public agencies.

Massive catastrophic and newly reported chronic pathogenic sewage dumping from Thousand Oaks’ sewage facilities have contaminated the Arroyo Conejo and the Calleguas Creek watershed all the way down to Mugu Lagoon and our county’s Malibu coast. These discharges threaten not just public health but also the downstream agriculture that relies on water from the Calleguas Creek watershed and the wetlands flora and fauna that inhabit this watershed.

In addition, recently reported sewage spills into Ventura’s Arundell Barranca and earlier sewage spills into Ojai Valley tributaries of the Ventura River raise very serious questions over whether our publicly owned sewage facilities are safe, reliable and under adequate surveillance, supervision and enforcement by county, state and federal regulators.

If these spills had been petroleum from oil company pipelines, these same regulators and their prosecutors would have been on these cases likes flies on cow droppings. The political outrage against such spills would have galvanized our state legislators into passing more effective laws requiring constant monitoring of sewage facilities and the immediate levying of huge penalties for environmental violations.

Add to these outrages the wanton destruction of waterways and wetlands throughout the county by a heavy equipment contractor under direction of our county’s public works agency, and you see nothing but massive public agency environmental indifference and lawlessness.

This wanton public agency destruction of Ventura County’s scarce and threatened wetlands, watersheds, shoreline and other water resources indicates a need for new and more stringent measures and actions to protect, conserve and enhance our natural water resources. SOAR--the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiative--is not enough.