Back to the beach

Danette Goulet

Debate rages on this week over the travels of the enormous plume of

partially treated sewage pumped 4 1/2 miles off Huntington Beach each

day.

At the center of the renewed controversy is a new study that found the

sewage does head back toward shore and may be a major contributor to the

high bacteria levels that closed miles of Surf City beaches in 1999 and

2000.

Orange County Sanitation District officials continue to deny this

possibility, citing their own ongoing study as proof.

The latest research, conducted by UC Irvine and Scripps Institution of

Oceanography in La Jolla, debunks the long-held theory that the sewage

plume is trapped far beneath the ocean’s surface by warm water, study

participants say.

“What our paper says is the internal tides are causing this cold water

to mix across the shelf toward the beach and that cold water is reaching

the surf zone,” said Brett Sanders, a UCI researcher and coauthor of the

study. “So the cold water isn’t trapped in Huntington Beach deep in the

ocean, it spills up into the surf zone.”

The shelf is the gradual slope of the ocean floor that extends beyond

the outfall pipe to where the ocean floor drops suddenly from 60 meters

to depths of 120 meters.

“Just because you see cold water at the beach, it doesn’t mean there’s

sewage at the beach -- it tells us cold water isn’t trapped and so sewage

isn’t trapped,” he said.

While there was not evidence to prove that the sewage plume reaches

the beach, the data does show that it comes more than half way back to

shore, Sanders said.

“We’ve observed the plume moving back, about four miles back toward

shore,” he said.

The study, conducted independently of the sanitation district, was

done using information gathered by the district in November and May of

2000.

And that’s a problem, sanitation district officials argue.

“We have a study done using the same data and we do not see the cross

shelf transport the way UCI does,” said Lisa Murphy, spokeswoman for the

sanitation district. “The report we did using the same data is part of

the ocean monitoring work that is currently being evaluated by an

independent panel of experts.”

The sanitation district study, which will be released in May, also

includes additional data, Murphy said.

It uses the same data used by Scripps and UCI researchers, she said,

but also contains bacteria information and the results of ocean testing

done in May through September 2001.

Sanders agreed that more study needed to be done to get a complete

picture, but new information would not negate the current data.

“This is their data -- they collected it,” he said.

This new study, which was released on the American Chemical Society’s

Environmental Science and Technology journal Web site, gives many yet

another reason to fight the sanitation district’s request to extend the

waiver that allows it to dump partially treated sewage.

The district currently holds a waiver that allows it to dump sewage

treated to less than the full secondary level required by the Clean Water

Act of 1972.

That waiver expires at the beginning of next year.

This new study has already had an impact on city leaders and coastal

commissioners.

The California Coastal Commission overwhelmingly voted not to grant

San Diego an extension on a similar waiver.

“The commission decided that San Diego needed to come up to full

secondary,” said commissioner Shirley Dettloff, who is also on the

Huntington Beach City Council. “I didn’t quote the study, I just

suggested to the commission that we are getting additional information in

Orange County and we are finding things we thought were fact, we’re

finding that with additional studies and changes in conditions, that

those facts may not be reality and the basis for making a decision on the

waiver will be impacted by the new evidence.”

* DANETTE GOULET is the city editor. She can be reached at (714)

965-7170 or by e-mail at o7 [email protected] .