Photo by Linda Renaud
On Sunday, July 4, one of the busiest beach days of the year, L. A. County Beaches and Harbors workers flushed thousands of gallons of contaminated water out into the ocean, near the intersection of PCH and Chautauqua. The water came the ‘mystery pond,’ a 350-ft.-long by 85 ft.- wide body of water which was once just an open trench running from the end of the Rustic Creek water channel into the ocean at the base of Santa Monica Canyon. Beaches and Harbors Division Chief Wayne Schumacher told the Palisadian-Post that he supervised the operation himself ‘at around 8 or 9 a.m.’ He added that he was responding to a request from the L.A. County Lifeguard Division, which was concerned about the amount of water that had collected in the pond. While the lifeguard division often requests that the pond be drained when the water gets too high, ‘concerned that beachgoers, particularly children,’ might fall into the 15-foot-deep pond ‘and drown,’ Garth Canning, captain with the County Fire Department, Lifeguard Operations, told the Palisadian-Post that the actual request to bulldoze the sand bar between the pond and the ocean to let the water out on July 4 came from the L.A. County Health Department. ‘People aren’t supposed to be in that water,’ said Bernard Franklin, Chief of Recreation Health Programs. ‘That’s why we have ‘No Swimming’ signs posted there, which people sometimes ignore. They are routinely posted within 100 feet of all the city’s storm drains leading to the ocean. It’s a matter of public safety.’ Asked if his department had tested the quality of water in the pond before requesting its release, Franklin said ‘No.’ When the Post asked all three officials if they were aware that the water was contaminated, all three said they were not aware. Last week, after discovering that no tests had actually been done on the pond water by either the city or the county, the Post had a sample tested by Baykeeper, an independent watchdog organization which monitors and patrols the beaches in Santa Monica Bay. ‘The pond is definitely a ‘hot’ spot,’ said Angie Bera, after performing the test at the Baykeeper’s in-house laboratory. ‘This means it’s polluted, and there’s lots of bacteria.’ While Bera found there was low salinity in the 100 milliliter sample (which indicates there is a combination of both salt and fresh water in the pond), the total coliform count, which measures bacteria from all sources (plant/animal/human) came in at 24,192 (the California limit is 10,000); E.coli, which is a direct indicator of the fecal count, came in at 10,462 (400 is acceptable); and enterococci bacteria, which like E.coli helps determine the extent of the fecal contamination, was 3,255 (a count of 104 is the most desirable). The Post had the water tested after receiving persistent complaints from Santa Monica Canyon resident Gregg Willis, who in the last few weeks alone has seen the water in the pond flushed out to the ocean on several occasions. ‘Anyone can see that the pond, which is not even supposed to be there, is polluted,’ said Willis, who has lived across the street from the area for 18 years. ‘So I wanted to know why they kept bulldozing it out, but no one could give me a straight answer. It’s a cesspool, and while everyone agrees it’s a problem, no one seems to be doing anything about it. First of all, I want to know where all of the water is coming from. If the low-flow-diversion project (LFD), which cost over $1 million, is working as it should, there shouldn’t be any water at all.’ For years Will Rogers State Beach at Santa Monica Canyon regularly received an F rating from Heal The Bay. This summer it has had only A’s. ‘The improvement can be attributed directly to the city’s low-flow diversion project, which is now fully operational,’ said James Alamillo, who monitors the beach reports for the non-profit organization. Before the storm drain was completed last fall, the location was considered one of the worst polluters of the bay, with an estimated four million gallons of filthy water streaming down the channel and into the ocean during the dry-weather season (April through October). The LFD project was designed to divert water run-off to the Hyperion Treatment Plant in El Segundo, where it is filtered before being discharged into the ocean. The drain was installed under the Golden Bull restaurant parking lot. So why is there a pond? ‘There are two factors,’ Alamillo said. ‘One is high tide (bringing salt water into the pond), the other is an excess of water coming out of the channel. The dry-weather diversion cannot handle the excess flows from Rustic, Sullivan, and Mandeville canyons. The City of L.A. engineered and constructed the diversion to handle an average flow coming out of Santa Monica Canyon. However, as with most natural systems nothing is ever in a steady state. The flows from the channel are at times greater than the capacity of the diversion, and when that happens, the flow bypasses the concrete berm and flows directly into the old depression on the beach.’ He added, ‘Because a lot of this ponding water comes from stormwater, and because it doesn’t get flushed out by natural tides, it also often has unsafe levels of bacteria.’ When asked about the July 4 draining of the pond, Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, said: ‘It should never have happened. Flushing contaminated water into the ocean is unconscionable and negates everything we are trying to do here. People should not have been swimming in the ocean after they released that water. And they should have at least been told that the water had been flushed out.’ The solution to the problem, said Gold, is to pump out the storm-drain water coming down from the channel ‘and to fill in the pond with sand during the dry season.’ While Schumacher agrees that there is some engineering needed to deal with the overflow of water coming through the channel, he said completely filling in the pond with sand ‘is impossible. There needs to be an open trench from the channel to the ocean’ in case of flooding. ‘When was the last time you saw a major flood in the dry season?’ asked Gold. ‘It just doesn’t happen. Isn’t protecting swimmers more important than worrying about something that’s not going to happen?’ ‘I have not been told by anyone that the water is contaminated,’ Schumacher said. County crews bulldozed the pond again last Saturday, allowing polluted water to once again reach the ocean.
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