Runoff Remedies Will Be Complex, Costly : Beaches: Cleaning up coastal toxins could be as expensive as smog control.

A drop of rain plunks onto a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles. Spilling over the curb, it whirls down the drain. Five hours later, after coursing 18 miles through the heart of the city, the storm water--carrying every germ and chemical it encountered along the way--splashes into the ocean at Playa del Rey.

Every day, rain or shine, enormous quantities of potentially toxic wastes, from human sewage to garden pesticides to metals that flake off roofs and car brake pads, are washed from streets and yards onto the beaches Southern Californians cherish.

Urban runoff woes are nationwide, but the biggest battleground is Southern California. Nowhere else in the country has such an extreme problem and lags so far behind in curing it.

Orange County officials, for example, suspect that polluted runoff fouled the waters off Huntington Beach, causing high bacteria levels that forced the closure of the popular shoreline for much of the summer.

Cleaning up this coastal blight is expected to be one of the costliest and most challenging environmental endeavors that the region’s municipalities face in the new century, rivaling such massive programs as smog control and sewage treatment.

The bill in California could reach $14 billion, or nearly $500 for every resident, according to combined figures from the state Storm Water Quality Task Force and Caltrans.

Los Angeles, with so many people and so much pavement draining onto the shoreline, faces a huge task. Runoff in Ballona Creek and the Los Angeles River--the main arteries draining the city--is so heavily contaminated by the time it empties into the ocean that laboratory tests show it is toxic to some marine life.

Lighter than salt water, the waste doesn’t simply vanish in the deep blue sea. It lingers. Hugging the coastline and floating atop the ocean, the layer of contaminated water in Santa Monica Bay is typically 15 feet thick after rainstorms. During some savage storms, the polluted runoff from Los Angeles County unfolds like a gigantic fan, nearly reaching Santa Catalina Island, 26 miles offshore, and contaminates the shoreline from Point Dume in Malibu to Seal Beach in Orange County.

In dry weather, the volume is less dramatic, but even then, in Los Angeles County alone, runoff on a single day would be enough to fill the Rose Bowl.

The federal Clean Water Act mandated controls on urban runoff 13 years ago, but Southern California cities and counties are only now putting programs in place that aim to protect the ocean. Deadlines, under a new permit system, are just now coming due.

When it comes to controlling runoff, “virtually everyplace . . . is more advanced [than Southern California]. Even Phoenix,” said Cat Coleman, a water quality specialist for the EPA’s western region.

Some communities, such as Malibu and Huntington Beach, have done little to reduce runoff because of the complexity and cost. Others--led by Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Laguna Beach and San Diego--are becoming pioneers in finding ways to divert pollution from their beaches.

While the overall effort will be immense, solutions to cleaning up at least some of the region’s contaminated beaches are surprisingly simple.

In Laguna Beach, contaminated runoff flowed for years onto the picturesque waterfront at Fisherman’s Cove. Charlie Rohrer’s multimillion-dollar showcase home perches above the beach, and when his guests peered down from his deck, they were unable to hide their disgust at the filthy water pooling on the sand. Rohrer has found dead rats rotting there, and even a plucked chicken. Dogs drank the runoff, and children splashed in it.

Last summer, Laguna Beach built a simple $10,000 drain that during dry weather directs the 2,000 daily gallons of runoff into a nearby sewer pipe.

Instantly, Fisherman’s Cove was free of runoff. The city has already fixed four other drains and is working on more projects that will divert 85% of summer flow by 2007 at an annual cost per household of $6.

Designed with a bit of engineering ingenuity, some drains, pipes, gates and filters can work wonders to channel pollution away from the ocean, although only in the rain-free, summer months when beaches are used the most.

Several dozen projects to divert storm drains, scattered throughout Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, recently have begun to direct the bacteria and toxic compounds to sewage treatment plants instead of the ocean.

Unfortunately, most runoff problems are too massive to correct with simple hardware.

During rainstorms in Southern California, so much runoff rushes toward the ocean that there is no imaginable way to capture every drop.

If all the channels and pipes that drain the streets of Los Angeles were strung end to end, they would stretch to St. Louis. There isn’t enough open land to filter the waste they carry, or a plant big enough to treat it, anyplace in Southern California.

If Los Angeles wanted to direct its storm runoff onto land, as Fresno does, instead of the beach, it would need to annex a whole new county to do it. A treatment plant would have to be 10 times larger than the city’s Hyperion sewage treatment plant, costing billions of dollars. Clearly, neither of those options is practical.

Unlike sewage plants and factories, which can be cleaned up using simple, if costly, technology, there is no easy solution to the runoff problem.

“Nobody owns the storm water,” said UCLA environmental engineer Michael Stenstrom, who specializes in Los Angeles runoff. “You can’t point to industries like you can with other problems.”

Local officials hope to ease the problem by changing how Southern Californians live--especially how they behave outdoors.

From school performances to multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns, Southern Californians are being urged to pick up after their pooches, keep motor oil out of curb drains, and use a broom, not a hose, to clean off walks and patios.

Changes could involve how land is developed, how buildings and driveways are constructed, how gardeners tend to their yards, how auto repair shops clean up their waste, how freeways are scrubbed.

The hottest issue is what developers of new strip malls, subdivisions or other large projects must do. On Sept. 16, the Los Angeles regional water board, a state agency, will consider a measure that would require cities to ensure new developments are designed to capture runoff from storms as large as three-quarters of an inch of rain.

“A lot of this work is just now beginning,” said J. Charles Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water issues, “and it will extend over the next decade as we in society figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

The Junk Stops Here

In Ballona Creek, the dirty underbelly of much of Los Angeles, the immensity of the challenge becomes clear.

Along its dash to the sea, this concrete creek collects the junk discarded in the streets by nearly 2 million people in Los Angeles, Culver City, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Beer cans, shopping carts, car mufflers, baby strollers and dead possums make their way into the channel. City crews even joke that someday they will, in fact, find the proverbial kitchen sink floating in Ballona.

Ballona Creek, like other storm channels in Southern California, is capable of clearing torrents of water out of the city within minutes, preventing the floods that used to leave large areas underwater. In the 1930s, when construction began, the Army Corps of Engineers imagined Ballona Creek as a concrete freeway for storm water.

But no one thought about the ramifications of turning the ocean into Los Angeles’ garbage bin. All of Ballona Creek’s runoff flows to the northern end of Dockweiler State Beach in Playa del Rey.

“All of the drains were created to have the greatest velocity, so if any trash gets in them, it’s gone, washed out to sea,” said Bill DePoto, a supervising engineer in Los Angeles County’s public works division. “Now, though, we have to back up and say trash at the beach is a problem.”

For every inch of rain that falls in Los Angeles, two tons of garbage wash into the creek. A net strung across Ballona since the fall of 1997 stops big debris from reaching shore. But the hidden dangers--bacteria, pesticides, fertilizer, hazardous metals--still wash off streets and into the ocean.

Even after a month without rain in Los Angeles, the creek remains half a foot deep without any natural water sources. Drip by drip, water pools from backyard sprinklers, car washings and waste dripping onto freeways.

So much of the Los Angeles area is paved with impermeable material--from roofs to driveways--that a drop of water can hit downtown Los Angeles and never strike soil until it spills into the ocean.

Rainfall, in a typical one-inch storm, is whisked down Ballona Creek at a pace of five feet per second, estimates UCLA’s Stenstrom. On a dry day, it moves more slowly: Water dripping into a curb in downtown Los Angeles will flow into the ocean about 25 hours later, he estimates.

A dozen major channels carry waste to the ocean between Ventura and San Diego. The Los Angeles River, the San Gabriel River and Malibu Creek leave the beaches where they discharge--at the port in Long Beach, the northern end of Seal Beach and Malibu’s Surfrider Beach--ranking among the nation’s most polluted.

Ballona Creek is the most notorious carrier because it pollutes popular Santa Monica Bay beaches and drains such a dense, urbanized area. Its flow ranks in the worst 10% of the nation’s most polluted runoff, according to Stenstrom’s computer models.

Pavement not only makes more runoff, it increases its velocity.

Ballona’s runoff races to the ocean unimpeded and hits the breakwater at Marina del Rey with such force that the plume spreads along the coastline. Heavy contaminants settle to the bottom, building up in the sediment.

“It’s a hazardous waste dump right out here,” said UCLA environmental engineer Mel Suffet.

During just one rainy day in April, the last rain of the season, nearly 400 pounds of copper and zinc residue flowed into the ocean via Ballona Creek. Copper erodes from brake pads and zinc washes off galvanized metal structures.

Runoff contains so much metallic residue that sea urchins are rendered infertile, and the reproductive problems persist as far as two miles offshore. Even when diluted 10 to one, Ballona’s runoff is potent enough to harm urchins, said Steven Bay of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, a scientific group funded by the EPA and the region’s sanitation agencies.

Because the toxicity tests were so dramatic, Los Angeles County officials say cleaning up zinc and copper is their top priority for runoff.

But what puzzles biologists is that urchins and other benthic creatures seem to be thriving on the bottom of Santa Monica Bay. Although the waters off Los Angeles are among the most well-studied in the world, biologists do not fully understand what runoff does, how the ecosystem functions, or how to measure subtle changes in a vast expanse of ocean. Uncertainty extends up the food chain, with the impacts on fish, birds, whales, dolphins and other marine life unknown.

“The big question,” Bay said, “is where does this [runoff] go, and are we looking in the right places?”

Southland Paved the Way for Pollution

Until now, most Southern California cities have done little more to clean up runoff than stencil “No Dumping” signs on street curbs.

But time has finally started to run out.

Since 1986, the federal Clean Water Act has prohibited anything but storm water from flowing into storm drains. Municipalities are supposed to clean up runoff to “the maximum extent practicable.” But the U.S. EPA didn’t force cities and counties to comply, focusing instead on more easily identifiable water pollution from industries and sewage plants.

As of July 30, a state-enforced permit, required by the EPA, took effect. All 85 cities in Los Angeles County, plus the county government, must begin implementing storm-water solutions. Auto repair and salvage shops, for example, must place drip pans under cars to catch leaking oil and keep waste sheltered from rain.

Still, after years of debate, the details remain as murky as the water the regulations intend to clean up. It is not clear, environmentalists say, if the measures will be rigorous enough to really clean up beaches. The EPA has offered cities and counties virtually no financial help or guidance in how to reduce runoff.

While the scope of the problem is vast, many of the individual solutions are small-scale.

If houses and offices were surrounded with gravel strips, grassy swales, bricks and paving stones, runoff could filter into the soil. Streets and sidewalks could be built with permeable types of asphalt and concrete, and driveways sloped to drain onto lawns.

“If we don’t fundamentally change the way we build, we’re not solving the problem and it’s just going to get worse,” said David Beckman, a senior attorney with the Los Angeles office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which won lawsuits forcing Los Angeles County and Caltrans to reduce runoff. “A lot of this is decidedly low-tech. We’re not talking about building a treatment facility at every shopping center.”

Because cars and trucks are like miniature factories that produce water pollution, Caltrans--keeper of the freeways--has been forced to lead the way.

In 1994, a federal judge ordered Caltrans to take steps to keep waste that leaks onto Los Angeles County’s 1,200 miles of freeways out of the ocean. Caltrans scrubbed 30,000 freeway drains, many of them decades old and never before cleaned.

More than 5,000 tons of waste were removed, about 20% so contaminated with lead that it qualified as hazardous waste. The drains now are regularly cleaned.

The state agency also is experimenting at 23 sites with techniques to hold, filter or treat massive amounts of storm water where there is very little space alongside freeways to do it, said Richard Gordon, Caltrans’ maintenance storm-water coordinator.

One device circulates the water like a whirlpool, drawing the contaminated sediment into a basin. Others have inserts that look like big socks at the end of a drain. The simplest of all are grass strips alongside freeways.

In downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica, city crews are experimenting with filters for curbside catch basins.

UCLA’s Stenstrom found that installing drop-in baskets lined with absorbent material can capture 90% of the oily waste and metal-laden sediments. During storms, the system is bypassed to avoid floods, but runoff on dry days or small rainstorms is filtered. Stenstrom estimated that each would cost less than $500 and might only have to be cleaned annually.

Even that modest cost, however, would add up to $30 million to equip all 60,000 catch basins in Los Angeles alone.

Moreover, many public works engineers are unconvinced that such devices wouldn’t cause floods or cost a lot to clean. Los Angeles County engineers won’t even consider them.

So far, the technique most popular is diverting runoff during summer months into the sewers.

Santa Monica was the first to divert a storm drain, in 1994. Two channels rendered beaches near the city’s pier so polluted they consistently received an “F” in report cards prepared by the environmental group Heal the Bay. Now, the beaches there get As.

Santa Monica and Los Angeles are building an $8-million plant that will treat the pier area’s runoff year-round and use it to irrigate parks and other landscaping. The captured runoff will be a mere drop in the bucket, however. Los Angeles would have to build 20,000 such plants to hold all the runoff in a typical rainstorm.

“To be honest, this is exorbitantly expensive for what we’re doing,” said Roger Gorke, Santa Monica’s former storm-water coordinator, who now works for the EPA.

Also, diverting runoff isn’t a cure-all. “Diversions work only during dry weather, so during wet weather we still have a problem,” said Xavier Swamikannu, who manages storm-water enforcement at the Los Angeles regional water board. “Also, it doesn’t get at the source of the problem.”