War on Surf Germs May Be Costly

Putting urban runoff through sewage treatment facilities would help to clean up the ocean but would increase the system’s flow tenfold and add monumental costs, a spokesman for the Orange County Sanitation District said Thursday.

Already, the district will be spending $1.5 billion over the next 20 years just to maintain its facilities and treat sewage, said Blake P. Anderson, the district’s assistant general manager.

Anderson was one of the speakers at a forum in Huntington Beach on possible solutions to the recent high bacteria levels this summer that prompted health officials to close much of the city’s oceanfront for two months.

Though no source of the bacteria has been confirmed, health officials suspect urban runoff through storm drains.

The district, which serves 2.2 million people living in 21 cities, is considering diversion of urban runoff into its sewage treatment facilities to eliminate the kinds of bacteria found off Huntington Beach.

But the costs are high.

In Huntington Beach alone, the district estimated, it would cost $420 a day to treat runoff not including the costs of hookups, pipelines and other materials that the city would bear.

Four pump stations, one owned by the county and three by Huntington Beach, pour 1 million gallons of runoff a day into channels leading to the ocean. The district’s estimate of roughly $150,000 a year to treat the runoff is discounted by 40%, said Robert P. Ghirelli, who manages technical services for the sanitation district.

“The total cost is more like $660 per million gallons a day,” Ghirelli said. “We’re going to our board this month to seek authority to waive what we call the connection fees to offer Huntington Beach the lower rate.”

The board’s next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 27.

Leaking sewage was originally believed to have caused high bacteria levels at Huntington Beach that led to closing a 4.2-mile stretch of beach. But after spending more than $1.2 million investigating the problem, a task force that included the sanitation district ruled out sewage from the district as the cause.

So the task force shifted its emphasis toward urban runoff, especially water flowing from the Santa Ana River.

Comments by the district’s officials were part of a town hall meeting convened by Republican Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach).

Providing estimates for treating storm runoff is unique to the sanitation district. San Francisco combines its storm drain and sewage pipes, but few other Western cities do. Such combining is more typical of cities in the East.

“We’ve never had to consider it,” Ghirelli said. “Our history has been to keep this stuff out of our system because storm runoff would limit our capacity to treat sewage.”

Most sanitation facilities in California use separate pipelines for sewage and storm drain runoff for fear of backups during heavy rainstorms, which could pollute the ocean with raw, untreated sewage.