Tossing a Lifeline to Our Ailing Sea

Hillary Hauser walks, talks and drives as if she’s in a race. A race to save the ocean.

Every few minutes, her outrage bubbles up and she practically spits her words.

“Santa Barbara should be ashamed!” she fumes. Ashamed that a few steps from the major beachfront hotels, signs often warn against ocean swimming because of high bacteria counts.

Not that Santa Barbara is alone. Beaches in Malibu and parts of Orange County have been notoriously fouled for years. But Hauser’s area of expertise is the spectacularly scenic coastline from Goleta to Ventura.

“Look at this,” she says while driving across Mission Creek just above Cabrillo Boulevard in Santa Barbara. A current of green sludge with disgusting clumps of floating gunk flows past the back of a hotel and under the boulevard on its way to the sea.

“It’s in-sane!”

I hung out with Hauser a couple of weeks ago. She’s a former Santa Barbara News-Press reporter who covered the waterfront, got hooked on trying to save the coast and eight years ago began a muckraking research and advocacy outfit called Heal the Ocean (www.healtheocean.org).

I knew The Times’ five-part series on human destruction of the world’s oceans was about to run, and I wanted to hear Hauser’s thoughts on what we can do locally to make a difference.

Her passion is rooted in her memory of what the coastline used to be like. In 1954, when Hauser was in fifth grade, her family moved to Miramar Beach in Montecito and she grew up marveling at the sea creatures outside her back door.

“There were crabs, anemones, little shells with animals inside and hermit crabs. It was a tidal pool, with eel grass, lobsters, fish. It was alive.”

But decades of overdevelopment, toxic runoff and the dumping of waste into the ocean have changed all that.

“We killed it,” Hauser says. The seabed where she once splashed around now looks like a dusty underwater desert.

What happened?

The long answer was in last week’s series by my colleagues Kenneth R. Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling. We’ve used the world’s oceans as dumping grounds for sewage, chemicals, cigarette butts and disposable plastics. We’ve filled the air with burned fuel that falls into the ocean by the tons each day, feeding the strangling growth of algae and bacteria.

It’s an overwhelming juggernaut, Hauser says. But there are places where water quality has been improved through human intervention, and there are ways each of us can have a hand in reversing or at least stalling the damage.

In Los Angeles, for instance, her friend and counterpart Mark Gold of Heal the Bay is encouraging people to send a letter or go make a stink at the Sept. 14 meeting of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, which has failed to enforce bacteria-pollution limits on local beaches (check www.healthebay.org for more information).

“It’s better not to put fertilizer on your lawn,” says Hauser. “It’s better not to throw trash into creeks and junk down your drain. But to our way of thinking, there’s this massive infrastructure problem in which we’re using the ocean to dump sewage into. That is the elephant in the room.”

Conventional wisdom in the Santa Barbara area and also on Santa Monica Bay is that untreated storm runoff is a bigger cause of ocean bacteria than sewage dumping, which is treated before being pumped to sea.

Why’s that your problem? Because the grease spot in your driveway, the greeting card left by your dog, the hamburger wrapper that blows out of your hand -- they’re all likely to end up in the ocean.

Or if you live along the coast and you have a leaky septic tank, you may end up swimming in the last thing you flushed.

In Hauser’s office is an aerial map of all the septic tanks between Goleta and Carpinteria, with a red dot for each. The map is full of them, and Hauser says all that red means a lot of septic crud is leaching into groundwater and emptying into creek beds that flow to the ocean.

Her veins bulge when she talks about the history of using septic tanks instead of modern sewage systems in places like Hope Ranch in Santa Barbara and in Malibu as a means of controlling growth.

“Un-be-lievable!”

She’s fought to regulate septic tanks and hook homes up to sewage systems. But she’s also screamed and yelled about the need to upgrade ancient sewage pipes and extend pumping farther out to sea, especially since hepatitis A and enteric viruses have been detected on beaches.

She bristles when she recalls a 2004 fight in Montecito, one of the wealthiest communities in the nation, to modestly raise sewer rates so the city could upgrade the sewage system. Even with the increase, the rate is less than the average monthly cost of cable TV service.

Although most experts agree that secondary treatment breaks down nearly all solids and disinfects sewage, Hauser thinks we can do better. Upgrading to tertiary treatment, she says, would cost less than an additional $13 a month in the city of Santa Barbara.

Hauser has dived near outfalls along the Santa Barbara coast, where she has seen solids surge from pipes. Summerland, she says, dumps its sewage 740 feet from the beach in 19 feet of water. Carpinteria discharges 1,000 feet out in 25 feet of water.

It ought to be at least a mile or 80 feet of water, Hauser argues, whichever comes first.

She and I stand on the bluff at Butterfly Beach, next to the Biltmore Hotel, and she points to a spot just 1,550 feet offshore. That’s where Montecito’s outfall pipe dumps millions of gallons of sewage into just 22 feet of water.

“Right into the surf zone,” Hauser says. “With the right wind and light, you can see the boil. And look at this. You’ve got kids swimming down on the beach.”

As we stand above the rolling surf, a short walk from where Hauser once investigated tidal pools teeming with life, the midday sun casts a golden glow on a fragile stretch of paradise.

“I really believe that one of these days,” Hauser says, “we’re going to say, ‘We did what!? We were out of our minds!’ ”

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez