Sewage Headed to Beach, Test Finds

Partially treated sewage released daily four miles offshore is creeping back toward Huntington Beach, Orange County Sanitation District scientists said Thursday.

Sanitation district tests Nov. 27 revealed a finger-shaped mass of sewage pointing back to a power plant on the shore of Huntington Beach about 1 1/2 miles off the coast. The tests also uncovered surprisingly high bacteria levels right off the beach in the afternoon--a time when tests have not previously been conducted.

Sanitation officials have been on the defensive since UC Irvine scientists in November released a study theorizing that the AES Corp. power plant in Huntington Beach might be drawing back sewage as it pulls in and releases ocean water to cool its equipment. About 240 million gallons of sewage is released from the district’s outfall pipe four miles offshore each day.

Stanley Grant, the lead author of the UC Irvine study, said the sanitation district’s findings “are quite significant. Their study makes our hypothesis more credible.”

But George Robertson, chief scientist for the sanitation district, said that the tests uncovered no evidence that the sewage actually reached the beach, and that some of the findings seem to be in conflict with the UC Irvine study.

“The ability for the plume to get to the shore still isn’t there,” said Robertson. The plume “was a little closer than we’ve seen before.”

Another sanitation official acknowledged that on the day the tests were conducted, the power plant was undergoing maintenance and pulling in only about 2,000 gallons of water, rather than the normal 300 million gallons of ocean water. Huntington Beach spokesman Richard Barnard said the sanitation district’s findings were far from complete.

“All of that has to be discounted on a winter’s day when the power plant wasn’t even operating,” Barnard said. “This test showed that there is something possibly going on. They need to do a thorough analysis.”

Before the results, sanitation officials generally scoffed at suggestions that sewage discharged miles offshore might be migrating back to the coast. Researchers began studying the ocean waters after county, city and state officials were baffled by high fecal bacteria levels that closed miles of shoreline off Huntington Beach for most of the summer of 1999.

Also on Thursday, Huntington Beach officials began testifying before a county grand jury investigating whether they withheld information that summer about the extent of sewage leaking from aging pipes.

Experts are still struggling to pinpoint the source of that summer’s pollution.

Orange County is one of three agencies in Southern California that has a waiver from the federal Environmental Protection Agency that allows the release of minimally treated sewage into the ocean. In addition to Orange County, the cities of San Diego and Goleta, near Santa Barbara, have federal permission to release minimally treated waste. The city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County remove more solids before sending human waste into the ocean.

Scientists have long thought that the topography of the coastal shelf off Huntington Beach, the direction and speed of currents, and a temperature inversion layer--called a thermocline--acted as a trap to keep the sewage plume several miles offshore. But the UC Irvine study raised troubling new questions about whether subsurface waves could be carrying sewage from the plume back to the beach.