Malibu to Try Storm Drain Runoff Filters

Taking a cue from the food packaging industry, Malibu officials said Friday they plan to install high-tech sanitizing equipment to clean storm drain runoff that contaminates the community’s showpiece, Malibu Lagoon.

Street runoff will soon be filtered through a combination of ultraviolet light and ozone to kill bacteria and viruses before it pours into the lagoon.

The process is similar to one used by some dairies and bottling plants to sterilize milk and juice containers.

Scientists say the purification system is so efficient that it can make storm drain water safe to swim in.

The first $340,000 set of filters will be installed in January in a storm drain next to movie stars’ homes in the famed Malibu Colony.

On Friday, city officials took steps toward possibly adding such filters to two other major drains that empty into the lagoon.

Word of the cleanup plan drew cheers from surfers at Surfrider Beach near the lagoon and from nature lovers visiting a wildlife preserve around it.

“This is the kind of thing I’ve been urging them to do for five years,” said Susanne Dickerson, a docent with the Santa Monica Mountains Resource Conservation District, who was leading a group of Thousand Oaks third-graders on a nature walk around the lagoon.

Dickerson, of Woodland Hills, was careful to keep the 8-year-olds away from the brackish lagoon water. Signs posted around the lagoon declare: “Warning! Storm Drain Water May Cause Illness. No Swimming.”

Health officials have long recognized the hazard of physical contact with lagoon water, which for most of the year is separated from the ocean by a wide spit of sand.

During rainy winter months--and when the sandy beach berm is bulldozed to make a connection--lagoon water empties into the ocean, polluting nearby Surfrider Beach. In the past, lagoon spillage has earned the popular surfing beach an F rating from the environmental group Heal the Bay.

“The general rule is you don’t surf here for two days after a rain,” surfer Mike Theodore, a Manhattan Beach teacher, said Friday.

Although some have blamed lagoon pollution on effluent discharges from a Calabasas sewage treatment plant about five miles upstream and from Malibu residents’ septic tanks, officials have fingered the city’s three storm drains as a major culprit.

They carry street runoff, which is contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria from lawn fertilizer and animal droppings as well as with motor oil and other chemicals.

The filters to be installed in January on the ocean side of Pacific Coast Highway will cleanse Malibu’s “highest-profile drain,” as city engineer Richard Morgan put it.

The project will be financed with $61,000 in city funds, a $51,000 Los Angeles County grant and a $5,000 donation from Southern California Edison Co. A Utah firm, Bioxide Corp., is contributing $220,000 in equipment.

The company has obtained rights to the patented sterilization process from Elopak A.G., a Norwegian food packaging firm located. Bioxide President Glenn Meixell said he hopes to use the Malibu drain to prove to health experts that street runoff can be cleaned without being piped to a conventional sewage treatment plant.

Scientists from Battelle, an Ohio research and technology firm best known for its role in the development of xerography, have designed the canister-shaped filters, which will be housed in an underground vault near the end of the drain.

In the process, ultraviolet light is absorbed by ozone in a water vapor atmosphere to produce powerful oxidants that kill microorganisms, said John Moorehead, a Battelle analyst. As the treated storm water flows out, the oxidants revert to oxygen, carbon dioxide and water, he said. A separator collects such things as grease and oil from the runoff.

Battelle scientists outlined the technology Friday to members of a Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project committee, an advisory group that will review the bid to win county funding for two additional Malibu drain filters.

Malibu engineer Morgan said panel members plan to closely monitor the operation of the drain filter.