Closing the Mouth While Holding the Nose

In the holiday spirit, let’s think of ways to be charitable toward Huntington Beach for not telling state officials about significant sewage leaks in the 1990s.

Uh . . .

Hmm . . .

Well, let’s see . . .

They forgot?

That’s the best I can do.

If the city of Huntington Beach were a private company trying to protect its corporate rear, you could almost understand. You wouldn’t like it, but at least you’d realize few companies blow the whistle on themselves unless they have to. No one expects Philip Morris to say, “Hey, don’t buy our cigarettes; those things will kill you.”

But a city?

A city with 200,000 residents that trusts its elected officials to safeguard the public health? Especially when it comes to such out-of-sight, out-of-mind functions as sewage disposal?

A disclaimer: I’m not conversant on sewage. Nor do I want to be. I don’t like to contemplate either my own sewage or that of my loved ones, let alone millions of gallons from total strangers.

That’s the kind of thing we citizens trust the government to handle. The less we know about it, the better.

Unfortunately, Huntington Beach took that a bit too much to heart.

It apparently figured the leaks reported by its city workers would remain its dirty little secret--even though the pipes were leaking underground.

Yuck.

Underfoot, Under Wraps

This week, state water officials ordered the city to examine its ground water and clean up any residual sewage that might have leaked. Figures from internal Huntington Beach memos, dated 1996, put the leakage at several millions of gallons over the years.

Those figures might be high, city officials now say.

I’ll say.

“These were significant leaks; a large volume of sewage had been released,” a water quality board investigator told Times reporter Meg James last week. “And we don’t know what happened to it.”

There’s a little added context to this, and it doesn’t make Huntington Beach look any better.

Orange County beachgoers remember the protracted closure off Huntington Beach shores in the summer of 1999--caused by the discovery of potentially dangerous levels of bacteria in the ocean.

No one was hurt more by it than Huntington Beach, ever protective of its “Surf City” emblem, and no one clamored more for a quick resolution of the problem than city officials and local merchants. They pointed the finger at runoff from other cities and from defecating birds.

Through it all, state officials now say, Huntington Beach didn’t say a word about its own massive leaks in years past.

As of this week, no one has connected the Huntington Beach leaks to the beach closure, but you can’t blame the state for being suspicious. Huntington Beach engineers say it’s likely the leakage decomposed in the surrounding soil.

Besides ordering the ground water examination, state officials also have given the city two months to submit a plan for tracing the leaked sewage. It also required the city to determine whether bacteria from the sewage reached the ocean.

The spin from City Hall is that the council publicly discussed the problem pipes in 1996 but decided against sewer maintenance fees because it didn’t feel the problem was that severe. Plus, it would have been expensive to bolster or replace the pipes, a process that began last year.

Whatever the city did or didn’t say publicly about the extent of the problem, the word never reached state officials who were supposed to be told.

So, while teams of scientists looked all over the place in 1999 for the source of the ocean contamination, irritated Huntington Beach officials standing next to them apparently either were whistling or looking down at their shoes.

And you wonder why the state is peeved?

Huntington Beach’s credibility stinks right now.

Like it or not, the rest of us need to hear a lot more in the weeks ahead about sewage than we ever wanted to.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times’ Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.