Able to Collect Toxic Residue In a Single Bound!
Steve Fleischli loves few things more than clean, clear water, the stuff known to habitues of the High Sierra and the South Pacific. But there isn’t much of the stuff in Los Angeles, so Fleischli has devoted himself to cleaning up dirty water laden with copper, lead, nickel and zinc residue; foamy ocean water strewn with fast-food wrappers and soda cans; rain runoff loaded with thousands of cigarette butts. Fleischli would like to be out of a job, but the bad habits of a growing metropolis ensure that he’ll have plenty to do for decades to come.
Which explains why, on this day, he is standing in an empty, industrial stretch of Carson, his head battered by a rainstorm, his blue jeans soaked, inspecting a stream of black, oily ooze flowing from the driveway of an auto dismantling yard. “What are fish supposed to do in that?” he snarls, anticipating the runoff’s journey from a nearby storm drain into the Dominguez Channel and, eventually, Los Angeles Harbor. Fleischli crouches next to the tainted water and grimaces as he collects a sample in a small beaker. “This,” he says, displaying the dusky liquid with satisfaction, “is evidence.”
If Fleischli were a cartoon character, he might be dubbed “Aquacop.” His real-life title is more nondescript--executive director of Santa Monica BayKeeper, a five-person nonprofit environmental group. But his pursuit is worthy of superhero status: protecting the Los Angeles coast from the never-ending onslaught of industrial grime, toxic slime and fish-killing filth generated each day by the area’s millions of people. Southern Californians love to brag to landlocked relatives about L.A.’s beautiful beaches and blue waves, but the reality is far less Edenic. Sea lions strangle themselves with fishing line; needles and dirty diapers wash up on shorelines; and even light rainstorms send so much bacteria and muck down storm drains and into local waters that health officials regularly warn swimmers to avoid the waves for several days.
Given all that, Fleischli’s task is downright Sisyphean. The books are loaded with anti-pollution laws designed to keep L.A.’s waterways clean, but the junk simply continues to mount. Officials can’t keep up with the growing population and its stream of detritus. As a result, enforcement is often sporadic. In setting policy, government agencies, under constant pressure from developers, must do a delicate balancing act and sometimes give business concerns priority over the environment.
Fleischli and the other BayKeeper staff choose to ignore the overwhelming odds and keep tabs on whatever their meager resources allow. The group doesn’t have the name recognition of Heal the Bay, which works to educate the public and beef up clean-water laws with an annual budget five times BayKeeper’s $400,000. But Fleischli seems content to think of BayKeeper as Heal the Bay’s scrappy kid brother, the one with the attitude. “We look at ourselves as the police enforcing the rules that Heal the Bay is working to create,” he says.
Fleischli and his colleagues routinely patrol Santa Monica Bay, peering through binoculars at suspicious tankers. They log anonymous pollution tips on a 24-hour hotline. And they investigate businesses and industries throughout inland Southern California, sampling the rainwater spilling out of industrial yards and filing lawsuits in attempts to stop polluters. “Urban runoff is the No. 1 problem for all Southern California coastal waters,” Fleischli says. It’s a sentiment echoed by Dennis Dickerson, executive officer of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. “It’s one of the most significant problems that we have,” he says.
That’s why, on this stormy day, when most Southern Californians are taking cover, Fleischli dons his jacket at BayKeeper’s Marina del Rey office, jumps into his Toyota pickup and makes a beeline for the Carson auto dismantling yard, one of many local sites the group has monitored. Over Tom Petty tunes and the patter of rain, Fleischli explains his urgency: Auto dismantling yards are vast graveyards for old cars. Dismantlers salvage the raw materials, but oil and heavy metals from the cars often collect on the ground, and unless owners take preventive steps, rainwater can wash the oil and metals onto city streets and into storm drains leading straight to the Pacific. Roughly 300 dismantlers operate in the county. Benzene, lead, copper, oil and grease all threaten the health of the ocean, Fleischli says.
Two years ago, after BayKeeper first found that the toxic goop flowing from this yard exceeded federal benchmarks, the group warned the owner, citing the federal Clean Water Act. When nothing changed, BayKeeper filed suit in federal court. (The group files five to 10 such lawsuits each year.) “We’re very hopeful they’ll settle soon,” Fleischli says as he nears the yard, “but until then we’ve got to keep gathering evidence of their contamination.” (Settlement can be expensive because dismantlers have to pay BayKeeper’s attorney fees, which can run as high as $100,000.)
Fleischli parks along the rain-soaked street and points to a long, thick, snake-like sock extended partway across the driveway. The device is designed to soak up oil and block runoff that has collected in the yard from washing down the driveway and onto the street. But it hasn’t been placed all the way across the entrance, so a steady stream of black fluid spills out. Fleischli shakes his head. “They still just don’t get it. Most of this stuff they have to do is really simple.”
As he collects his sample of dirty water running down the driveway, a worker in the yard walks toward the entrance, notices Fleischli and pulls the sock all the way across, stemming the flow. “I know that this is no good,” the worker says.
Fleischli agrees. “I just want to make sure you guys know that we’re serious,” he says. “If you talk to your lawyers, let them know we were here.” The man nods, and Fleischli hops back into his truck for the trip to a nearby laboratory, where he drops off the fluid for testing.
Weeks later, Fleischli gets the results. As he suspected, the copper, lead, nickel and zinc found exceeded government benchmarks. But Fleischli has even bigger news. The dismantler agreed to settle the lawsuit and make changes to comply with the law by installing a treatment system for the runoff. Fleischli is optimistic that the ocean will soon be spared this yard’s contamination. He proclaims it another BayKeeper victory: “I think the fact that we were down there showed them that we were serious.”
Government officials charged with monitoring industrial sites need all the help they can get. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, a state agency, employs 19 inspectors to monitor roughly 3,000 businesses--dismantlers, metal recyclers, metal plating shops, transportation yards, construction sites--with industrial storm-water permits such as the one in Carson. Tracking all those sites to ensure they live up to clean-water laws is a daunting task, says Dickerson, the executive officer of the board. What’s more, “there’s a serious concern as to how faithfully those businesses are implementing those requirements.”
Some in the dismantling industry aren’t as enthusiastic about Fleischli’s approach. Wayne Rosenbaum, a San Diego attorney who has represented eight dismantlers in cases filed by Santa Monica BayKeeper, says the group’s focus on the yards isn’t making coastal waters any cleaner. He believes BayKeeper should concentrate on bigger issues. “Every time you put your foot on the brake, a certain amount of copper is going to end up on the ground, and when it rains, a certain amount is going to end up in the storm drain,” he says. “Ultimately, the goal of water quality is good, but you’re not going to get there by beating up on a couple of auto dismantlers. You’re going to have to tell everyone to get out of their cars and walk.”
Martha Bucknell of the California Auto Dismantlers Assn., a nonprofit trade group representing about 500 dismantlers, also believes that cars are to blame. “Licensed dismantlers aren’t the pollution problem,” she says. “The vehicles are the pollution problem.”
Fleischli acknowledges that Southern California drivers and their cars contribute to urban runoff. But he maintains that cleaning up the mess has to start somewhere, and officials aren’t about to outlaw cars. “If we take the tack that the dismantling industry takes, that everyone else is the cause of the problem, then we’ll never get to clean water.”
*
SANTA MONICA BAYKEEPER CAN TRACE ITS BEGINNINGS TO THE HUDSON RIVER in New York, where in 1984 a group of activists formed Riverkeeper to file lawsuits against polluters under the 1972 federal Clean Water Act. The group’s many successes led environmentalists to form similar organizations around the country. Six groups now operate in California. In 1993, Terry Tamminen, an entrepreneur and scuba diver who didn’t like the changes he was seeing in Southern California waters, founded Santa Monica BayKeeper with one basic belief: “You can be the person who stands at the stream of polluted water coming into your bay and draws a line in the sand and says, ‘No more.’ ” Tamminen held that line as best he could until early 1999, when he left the group to head Environment Now, another nonprofit, and passed his aquacop badge to Fleischli.
The clean-cut 32-year-old grew up in Nebraska; his interest in the ocean was sparked by summer trips to visit his grandfather in Cape Cod. Back home, he often dreamed about the West Coast: “You grow up in the Midwest and a lot of the fantasy is about Santa Monica and the ocean out here.”
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, Fleischli majored in economics, biology and environmental conservation. “If you don’t understand biology you’re not going to understand why things need to be protected,” he says. “And I studied economics because a lot of people say, ‘How are you going to pay for that?’ ”
Afterward, Fleischli earned a law degree at UCLA and landed a job at a Los Angeles firm, where he worked as an environmental compliance lawyer, defending corporations. He made good money and worked to pay off his $70,000 in student loans. But he hated it. “I realized that I was only perpetuating the status quo.” After a year and a half, Fleischli quit, sold his car and moved to San Francisco, where he lived in a boarding house with nine roommates and eked out a living at an environmental law foundation. In April 1997, he landed a job as a legal and policy analyst at Heal the Bay. “I think I had $15 in my account when I got the job.” Two years later, he went to work for BayKeeper.
Fleischli earns $50,000 a year directing the organization, less than he was making as an attorney five years ago. He operates BayKeeper out of a small office a mile from the beach in Marina del Rey, sharing floor space with BayKeeper marine biologist Brendan Reed, who oversees a project to restore kelp in the bay; programs director Heather George, who manages a water-quality monitoring project; programs assistant Angie Bera; and field investigator Aron Gould. The office decor, ranging from beach-chic to science-shabby, reflects Fleischli’s multifaceted approach toward environmentalism. Neon green swim fins rest on a chair. A Dewey Weber long board is mounted on a wall. And posted near the entrance, an aging map of Los Angeles is labeled, “Sewage Spills, 1994-1998.” Small red dots on the map indicate spills. The map is plastered with red dots.
Seated at a desk strewn with papers, Fleischli struggles to articulate BayKeeper’s massive environmental challenge. “In one rainstorm you can see 13,000 pounds of trash come down Ballona Creek,” he says. Nets block some trash from entering the ocean, but not all. “How do you get a handle on that? Eight hundred thousand cigarettes a month make their way into our coastal waters. It’s just mind-boggling. We’ve got to do something about it.”
He picks up a 2,000-page book titled “Federal Environmental Laws” and drops it with a thud. “This is the bible,” he says. “In terms of forcing change, a lot of it takes place in the legal arena.” Fleischli frequently puts his legal background to work. He gathers evidence of violations, then files federal and state lawsuits or works with attorneys at Heal the Bay and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Some suits take six months to play out; others take years. Most are finally resolved through settlements.
Over the years, Santa Monica BayKeeper has made its mark. The group has sued the city of Los Angeles, seeking better maintenance of the sewer system. The Environmental Protection Agency recently joined the still-pending suit. In addition, BayKeeper and the NRDC won a lawsuit against Caltrans, forcing the agency to conduct a five-year, $30-million study to find better ways to manage polluted highway runoff, which makes its way to the Pacific via storm drains. That study eventually will help prevent hazardous waste and heavy metals on California highways from ever reaching the beach, Fleischli says. And BayKeeper, Heal the Bay and the NRDC won a watershed agreement from the Environmental Protection Agency to set pollution limits for the majority of river segments and beaches in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
That victory, in fact, led to a landmark ruling last month by the Regional Water Quality Control Board to ban trash from entering the Los Angeles River and its tributaries. Under the decision, the county, cities and Caltrans will be required to cut the litter their storm drains contribute by 10% a year over the next 12 to 14 years so that, at the end of the period, no trash should be entering the river. “It should have an enormous impact,” Fleischli says. “The whole point of this is that it provides clear, definitive rules for water quality. It’s very clear and it’s very enforceable.” Ballona Creek is expected to win similar protection soon.
Fleischli revels in the legal sparring, but he also loves to get out into the bay that he works so hard to protect. On a warm, sunny morning in Marina del Rey, Fleischli heads out on BayKeeper’s 34-foot boat with 10 UCLA environmental law students, several of whom research BayKeeper cases. BayKeeper founder Tamminen, who now sits on the group’s board of directors, takes the helm and motors through the harbor. Fleischli gleefully points out a sea lion frolicking in the blue water a few yards away.
The boat passes the marina entrance, then the mouth of Ballona Creek. Plastic bags and foam cups litter the water. Fleischli frowns. “The majority of what you see here is from Ballona Creek,” he says, pointing at the flotsam. “The beaches around here can be unbelievable.” Tamminen hits the throttle and the boat speeds into the open waters of Santa Monica Bay. The view is magnificent. Fleischli stands near the stern and surveys the blue waters to the north, stretching out past Malibu. He looks south, toward the waves beating against the cliffs of Palos Verdes. At times like this, with the morning sunlight shimmering on the waves, the bay can seem idyllic. But if anyone knows that looks can be deceiving, it’s Fleischli. He raises his voice over the din of the motor and complains to the students about the thousands of cigarette butts tossed out of cars that eventually wash onto Southern California beaches.
Law student Derek Jones nods in agreement, then pipes up. “So if we see someone throw a cigarette butt out the window,” he says, “we should tell them that Steve Fleischli of BayKeeper will kick their ass?” The aquacop looks out at the blue horizon and grins. “Yeah.”