Caltrans Still Lagging on Water Pollution Abatement

For more than a decade, the California Department of Transportation has been a chronic violator of federal laws designed to prevent enormous amounts of polluted water from running off highways into rivers, streams and the ocean.

Years of environmental lawsuits, government investigations and internal reviews show that Caltrans, which operates 15,000 miles of highway, consistently has failed to stop sediment and contaminants from draining off roads, bridges, construction sites and maintenance yards.

“We’ve had a long history with Caltrans,” said Jeremy Johnstone, an enforcement official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco.

“They are a much better actor than they used to be, but there are still problems. They get spanked, and they get the message for a while. Then they slack off. It’s a tough agency to police.”

Caltrans officials contend that erosion and storm water runoff are complicated environmental problems with no quick fix. Taking care of the situation might be so expensive, agency officials say, that it could devour money for future road projects across the state. There have been problems in the past, they add, but the department is now committed to complying with the law.

“These are onerous regulations that require a change in the way we do business,” said J. Steven Borroum, chief of environmental engineering for Caltrans. “It takes a great effort to move a big ship. We now routinely do things we didn’t do five years ago.”

Yet the record shows that Caltrans continues to be derelict about storm water regulations, and that very few California highways have been designed or retrofitted with storm water controls. Moreover, getting caught violating the law has not prevented the agency from committing the same violations in other parts of the state.

Illegal discharges threaten water resources across California, including steelhead trout and salmon habitat on the northern coast, the Truckee River below Lake Tahoe, Santa Monica Bay, dolphin birthing grounds off Crystal Cove State Park in Orange County, and San Diego and San Francisco bays.

Runoff from roads, farmland, urban areas and industrial sites has emerged as the No. 1 threat to water quality in California. Research shows that it is often toxic and can harm fish, sea urchins, shrimp, birds and microorganisms.

Silt from erosion can cloud sources of drinking water, disrupt spawning grounds and bury habitat for aquatic plants and bottom-dwelling animals.

Highway drainage poses its own problems. It can be a grimy mix of trash, oil, antifreeze, rubber, hydraulic fluid, exhaust particles, brake dust and microscopic bits of metal along with soil and organic materials, including human and animal waste. The flow also can contain solvents, detergents, fertilizers and pesticides.

It is difficult to determine how much contaminated water washes off state highways. Although highways represent roughly 2% of the land area that generates storm water, some studies suggest that the discharges are greater and far more toxic than other sources of runoff.

Scientists estimate that each year, one quart of oil per person ends up in runoff from the nation’s highways. If they are correct, about 7.5 million gallons of oil in California ends up in highway storm water every year--more than half the amount spilled by the tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989.

“In the long run, what we’re looking at is a slow-moving oil spill of huge proportions being dumped into our waterways,” said Ricki Ott, a marine toxicologist.

One example of the difficulty and expense of blocking runoff is a problem-plagued project along the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road in southern Orange County.

When the 16-mile highway was built in the 1990s, Caltrans encouraged the toll road authority to install 39 “cutting-edge” filters that use compost to cleanse storm water as it washed off the pavement.

After the road opened in 1996, Caltrans failed to maintain the drains, and they became clogged with sediment and vegetation. Internal inspections concluded that the drains were faulty. Caltrans now says the devices are too costly to maintain--about $1 million a year.

Last summer, the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board issued an order demanding that Caltrans fix the problems, fearing that polluted runoff might be flowing down coastal canyons to the ocean.

Caltrans now plans to begin a $13-million project to repair or replace the filters. The price tag is roughly 15 times what it cost to build the systems.

Officials of the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which built the road and installed the drains, said the controls would work if properly maintained and that Caltrans has misstated annual maintenance costs by 300%.

“I don’t believe what they are proposing will be any more effective,” said James D. Brown, the corridor agencies’ director of engineering and environmental planning. “The $13 million could be spent elsewhere.”

A History of Suits and Enforcement Actions

The San Joaquin Hills Toll Road is one of the latest in a long history of lawsuits and government enforcement actions involving the state’s giant transportation department.

Over the last decade, the agency has lost federal lawsuits in Los Angeles, San Diego and the Bay Area that alleged widespread violations of the Clean Water Act.

In five separate actions, the EPA has collected more than $1 million in penalties and settlements.

Critical evaluations have come from state water regulators, which have issued numerous cease-and-desist orders, as well as the Federal Highway Administration and annual in-house reviews by Caltrans.

“There have been widespread failures at Caltrans to reduce the No. 1 source of water pollution in the state,” said David Beckman, a Los Angeles-based attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental organization.

“Whatever Caltrans has done that’s positive, it has been forced to through litigation,” Beckman added.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Santa Monica BayKeeper, a local environmental group, brought the first major lawsuit against Caltrans in 1993, alleging that the department had failed to stem storm water runoff from 900 miles of roads and at least 35 maintenance yards in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

After more than a year of hearings, U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie ruled against Caltrans, finding that the department had paid only “lip service” to the law until there was significant pressure to do more.

Rafeedie rejected Caltrans’ argument that it didn’t have the money to comply with the rules. He ordered the agency to make comprehensive changes in its Los Angeles district office, including cleaning tens of thousands of highway storm drains and examining options to retrofit highways.

Caltrans has been so slow to comply that the agency has been threatened with contempt actions. Its Los Angeles district office remains under Rafeedie’s supervision eight years after the ruling.

Similar problems continue to surface elsewhere around the state, from the Truckee River, where state water regulators earlier this year fined Caltrans $30,000 for improperly discharging sediment and are now seeking an additional $208,000, to San Diego, where Caltrans workers recently were charged with blasting hundreds of pounds of paint chips into the bay during work on the Coronado Bay Bridge.

Methods of controlling runoff vary from relatively simple, low-tech devices to highly complex filters.

Erosion at construction sites, for example, can be controlled with sandbags, straw bales, tarps and absorbent materials to protect barren slopes. Simple plastic fences block silt.

Highway runoff can be filtered through large concrete vaults filled with sand, compost or minerals. Settling basins, roadside strips of vegetation, sand-filled trenches and drain inserts to catch litter also are effective.

Caltrans has earmarked $60 million a year over the next five years for runoff control work. But that is only a fraction of the billions that might be needed to fix highways in Los Angeles County alone.

Various Caltrans studies--some court-ordered, some not--are underway to discover more precisely the damage that runoff causes and the cheapest ways to control it.

But Caltrans argues that the expense of installing storm water devices generally outweighs the benefits.

Under the law, polluted storm water must be reduced according to guidelines that weigh environmental impact against cost.

In 1997, Caltrans estimated that the cost of storm water controls on 657 miles of highway in Los Angeles County would range from $2.9 billion to $4.9 billion, depending on the level of treatment.

To control urban runoff from all sources in the state, Caltrans studies indicate that the capital costs could range from $70 billion to $114 billion.

Such costs might exhaust state funds for road projects, “precluding them for a generation or more,” a California Transportation Commission report stated earlier this year.

Critics say highway departments in other states have controlled storm water runoff without seriously jeopardizing their construction programs.

Maryland treats about 90% of its storm water runoff before it reaches lakes, rivers or coastal waters. Oregon and Washington report that they treat at least 30%.

Maryland, which has 5,200 miles of highway and stringent state and federal regulations to protect Chesapeake Bay, has been installing runoff controls for more than 20 years. Highway officials there said the costs of filtering runoff have not delayed or canceled projects.

Critics Charge That Agency Inflates Costs

Natural Resources Defense Council lawyers say Caltrans often inflates costs to support the argument that controls are not worth installing.

Caltrans’ costs for retrofitting highways are dramatically higher than those of other states--10 times or more for certain treatment methods, according to a comparison by the group.

“The technology is developing and getting cheaper all the time,” council attorney Beckman said. “The way they get these huge figures is to take the most platinum approach possible.”

But state-to-state cost comparisons can be difficult because of weather, traffic and road characteristics. In California, high land values in urban areas and earthquake standards present additional hurdles.

Still, Borroum conceded that Caltrans’ original cost estimates for treatment might be cut in half if regional approaches are taken.

“We are working actively to cut those cuts and trying to move quickly on cost-effective devices,” Borroum said. “We are learning how to be better stewards of the environment.”

To help settle the cost debate, various storm water controls are under review in a court-ordered study at 38 projects throughout Southern California. They range from big, cylindrical oil and water separators to long strips of roadside vegetation that act as filters.

But the research might not quell the courtroom battles. In their nine-year-old Los Angeles case, Natural Resources Defense Council attorneys are considering new challenges, alleging that Caltrans continues to violate court orders.

“They are always saying they can’t do retrofit. They can’t clean out freeway drains. They can’t do this, they can’t do that,” said Everett DeLano, a council lawyer in San Diego County.

“We are always trying to push them along. We get a lot of resistance.”