Sewage Plant Is Finally Helping to Heal the Bay

It has taken years of court battles, environmental activism and more than $1 billion, but the waste water pumped into Santa Monica Bay by the city of Los Angeles is finally as clean as it’s supposed to be.

The city’s sprawling Hyperion sewage treatment plant is for the first time fully meeting pollution standards set 26 years ago by the federal government.

The milestone, reached this month, highlights significant improvement in the health of the long-abused bay, thrust throughout this century into the conflicting roles of city playground and toilet.

Los Angeles coastal waters face ongoing pollution problems, but the river of city effluent piped into the Pacific is the cleanest it’s ever been.

“It’s just such an incredibly momentous day for the bay,” rejoiced Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, an environmental group formed to force bay cleanup. “More than any other event I can think of, it’s a reminder of how far the bay has come.”

Los Angeles arrived reluctantly at this point. For years after sweeping pollution standards were adopted in the 1972 federal Clean Water Act, the city argued--along with many others in California--that it should be exempt from the law’s mandate to treat all ocean-bound waste water at the secondary level, biologically scrubbing it after most of the solids are removed in primary treatment.

Orange County and San Diego won exemptions. But the federal Environmental Protection Agency eventually said no to Los Angeles and sued to force the city into compliance. In 1987, city officials waved a white flag, signing a consent decree in which they agreed to almost immediately stop dumping sewage sludge in the ocean and to meet the secondary standards by the end of 1998.

They have done just that, and are on the verge of finishing a complicated and costly overhaul of the Hyperion complex that one sanitation official likened to open-heart surgery.

“We’ve got a flagship of a plant,” boasted Chris Westhoff, general counsel of the city Department of Public Works. “I can tell you everyone involved in it has a major sense of accomplishment. . . . A lot of us feel very, very good about having met the deadlines.”

The levels of suspended solids and a number of heavy metals discharged into the bay by Hyperion and the county Sanitation Districts’ sewage treatment plant in Carson have declined dramatically since 1971. Hyperion actually started meeting the secondary standard for solids removal nine years ago, well ahead of the court schedule.

That has improved water clarity in the bay, while the end of sludge dumping more than a decade ago has allowed some bottom-dwelling marine life to return to what was essentially a dead zone seven miles offshore.

City marine biologist John Dorsey said the area to which Hyperion’s treated effluent is piped, five miles off shore, has also become more hospitable to sea life--to the point where it’s not much different from the rest of the bay.

Still, the good news on the sewage front is countered by another major pollution source that will make the massive Hyperion improvements look like an easy fix.

Hyperion’s upgrade “is a very large step forward,” said attorney David Beckman of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But it just strips away one set of problems, which still leaves a critical problem--that posed by storm water pollution.”

When It Rains, It Pours

Urban runoff is now a greater source of some bay contaminants than treated waste water, according to the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project.

Massive piles of trash flow into the bay from storm drains when it rains. And the project points to high bacteria levels in runoff as the primary cause of health risks to swimmers and surfers.

Sediment contamination also persists in the bay, and additional sewage improvements are needed. The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts’ Carson plant, which processes roughly the same amount of sewage as Hyperion, still treats some waste water at only the primary level. The districts have until the end of 2002 to upgrade to full secondary treatment under a consent decree reached after the EPA and environmental groups filed suit.

Then there are the city’s sewer pipes, which are old, leaky and too small. They overflow during heavy rains, such as last winter’s El Nino downpours, sending raw sewage into storm drains and ultimately, the ocean.

The city has spent more than $300 million upgrading the collection system and plans to spend $1 billion more in the next decade.

The money is coming from $3.5 billion in bond issues approved by voters, signaling the degree to which an often tightfisted public has yearned for a cleaner bay.

“If you went out to the average Joe on the street, they wanted treatment,” said Michael Stenstrom, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment. “And the folks running the agencies didn’t want treatment. I think they lost some attachment to their constituency.”

However loath city leaders were in the past to embark on Hyperion’s $1.2-billion make-over, they are now like proud parents, bragging about the results and planning a major dedication ceremony next spring.

Almost entirely rebuilt in a brightly efficient, high-tech style, Hyperion neither looks nor smells like the end of the line for roughly 370 million gallons a day of sewage.

Packed into 144 acres just south of Los Angeles International Airport, the complex has commanding views of the ocean and a remarkably civilized scent. It is light-years away from the small plant opened on the site in 1925, when treatment consisted of screening out debris and pumping the raw sewage a mile into the bay.

The resulting sewage plume closed beaches from Venice to Manhattan Beach in the late 1930s and ‘40s. In 1950 a new plant, advanced for its time and designed to treat at secondary levels, was opened. But the city population was growing so quickly that after less than a decade, more capacity was needed.

The outfall pipe was moved to five miles offshore and primary treatment facilities were added, so that some of the sewage was given primary treatment and some secondary, a practice that endured until now.

The recent reconstruction was complicated by the fact that Hyperion had to remain in full operation while old facilities were torn down and new ones built. The city could not exactly turn off the pipes.

“It was a living nightmare,” said John Crosse, who managed the plant from 1990 to 1997 and is now assistant director of the city Bureau of Sanitation.

But one with a happy ending.

Mission Accomplished

The plant started sending all its flow through the secondary process the last week in November. As waste-eating bacteria in new tanks kick into full microbial gear, Crosse said the effluent is meeting full secondary standards for biochemical oxygen demand, and EPA officials say they expect the city to meet the Dec. 31 deadline.

The treatment process involves steps as simple as screening out toilet paper and as complex as keeping bacteria munching away in air-free “digesters” that resemble giant industrial eggs. Another set of bacteria, which like air, is kept happy with pure oxygen created in an on-site cryogenic facility.

The sludge left over from treatment--what used to be dumped in the ocean--is trucked to agricultural areas, where it is used to fertilize nonfood crops.

As Hyperion has grown more sophisticated and high-tech this decade, its staff has shrunk to 500 workers and its annual operating budget has been cut by half, to $47 million.

The rebuilding has not significantly added to the plant’s capacity of 420 million gallons a day. When two final biological reactor modules come on-line early next year, Hyperion will be able to treat 450 million gallons a day.

Crosse said that should be enough to handle the city’s sewage until 2010, when further expansion may be necessary somewhere in the system, which also includes three smaller plants. Those facilities, in the Sepulveda Basin, near Griffith Park and on Terminal Island, treat at advanced tertiary or secondary levels.

The Hyperion upgrade caps Crosse’s career, and he is planning to retire next year. But before he does, he has one major task at the plant: He has been assigned to try to get the Navy’s Blue Angels to do a flyover at the dedication ceremony.