Sewer Systems Across O.C. Need Help, Group Reports

More than three-fourths of Orange County’s sewer agencies need financial and technical help to update their aging systems, according to a Surfrider Foundation study released Tuesday.

The Laguna Beach and Trabuco Canyon water districts ranked among the least reliable and least efficient, while the Cypress, La Habra, La Palma and Rossmoor/Los Alamitos sewer districts received “straight A’s.”

“We recognize that no sewage system is going to be perfect and that spills happen,” said Don Schulz, study author and executive committee member of the environmental group’s Huntington Beach/Seal Beach chapter. “The whole purpose of this is to start developing a database for sewer spills and get everyone upgraded.”

The study used data collected from the Orange County Health Care Agency as well as from local news publications, including a Los Angeles Times report in August that concluded minimal maintenance and investment into local sewer lines is resulting in high numbers of sewage spills forcing closures of local beaches.

Schulz included several caveats to the report’s conclusions, noting that not all spills are reported and spill volumes are broad estimates.

Steve Weisberg, director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, commended the group for its efforts but said Surfrider is “limited by the quality of data available to them. As a result, the report card needs to be refined to reach full effectiveness.”

The study looked at two factors: reliability and efficiency. The former is the amount of sewage transported or treated between spills. The latter is the percentage of sewage spilled per mile of pipe.

These numbers were translated into letter grades. Of the 34 local agencies studied, 26 received a C or below and were advised to seek technical and financial aid.

Orange County treats or transports an average of 1.3-billion gallons of sewage between spills, and only a minute amount gets spilled per mile of pipeline. Though these numbers sound small, consider the massive amount of waste flowing beneath the county. Collection pipes, laid end to end, would stretch from Seal Beach to Greenland and back. The Orange County Sanitation District, which collects and treats sewage from 2.2 million people in northern Orange County, handles an average of 243 million gallons a day.

“It points to an overarching problem,” said Surfrider Executive Director Christopher J. Evans, who hopes the study will be replicated in the San Clemente-based organization’s 50 chapters across the country. “It’s time to start paying attention to infrastructure.”

According to the Assn. of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, the country’s 16,000 waste water systems, which treat about 17 billion gallons of sewage a day, face a $23- billion annual price tag to update aging systems. In Orange County, agencies have indicated a minimum $2 billion need in coming years.

Laguna Beach City Manager Kenneth C. Frank had not seen the study but was not surprised that his city received poor marks.

“I’m willing to concede . . . that we have a system that is old, was poorly designed over 50 years ago, built incrementally and is extremely difficult to maintain,” he said.

However, Frank noted that the city is taking costly steps to remedy the problem, such as replacing or lining miles of old pipes and raising sewer rates to pay for televised inspections.

Kurt Berchtold of the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, a state agency, said that while he agreed with some of the study’s general conclusions, they can be misleading.

“Whenever you attach a simple letter grade to a complex problem, it does tend to oversimplify,” he said.