Cities Join in Project to Rid Beach of Pollution

In a long-awaited effort to fight beach pollution, Santa Monica and Los Angeles have agreed to build an underground pipe that will channel contaminated rainwater out to sea from one of the area’s most notorious storm drains.

Construction of the 1,200-foot pipe at the mouth of the Pico-Kenter storm drain is only one part of a larger experiment by Santa Monica to clean up an increasingly polluted beach and bay.

Santa Monica hopes to become a model for West Coast cities searching for ways to treat storm drain runoff--bacteria-laden water regarded as one of the main ingredients in ocean pollution.

The Santa Monica City Council voted to enter an agreement with the city and county of Los Angeles to share the $580,000 cost of building a pipe to carry runoff water from the drain 600 feet into Santa Monica Bay.

The pipe will be equipped with a state-of-the-art alarm system that detects illegally dumped petroleum, diesel oil and other hydrocarbons, which must be pumped out of the water before it reaches the sea.

The job of placing of the pipe 10 feet under the sand is to start this fall, General Services Director Stan Scholl said.

The Pico-Kenter drain, which empties onto the beach at the western end of Pico Boulevard, has long been considered one of the worst sources of pollution among the 64 drains that dump into the bay.

Foul water from the drain frequently collects in stagnant pools on the beach, posing health risks for swimmers and occasionally forcing officials to close the beach.

County testing has shown that runoff is contaminated with high levels of coliform bacteria from animal excrement, as well as soil, lawn fertilizer and decaying worms and insects.

The pipe extension will carry water far enough into the ocean so that it will dissipate quickly and not collect near humans, officials said. According to city studies, the runoff is sufficiently diluted so that it will not hurt marine life.

But city officials--along with several environmentalists--recognize that the pipe extension tackles only part of the problem.

The real solution, they suggest, must come from treating the runoff water before it reaches the bay. Santa Monica is experimenting with the use of ozone gas to purify storm drain water. Officials claim that Santa Monica is at the vanguard of runoff-water treatment.

“What to do with storm drain water is a question that hasn’t been adequately addressed anywhere in the country,” City Manager John Jalili said.

“Historically, people didn’t pay attention to water flowing into the ocean. Environmentally, there is quite a bit of interest to see if this will work.”

Scholl predicted that the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which he said has praised Santa Monica’s experiment, will make storm drain runoff treatment mandatory within three years.

At the same time, officials concede that they are able to treat only a tiny portion of the water that flows through one of the bay’s largest storm drains. And the cost of expanding the treatment may be prohibitive.

But representatives of Heal the Bay, one of the principal environmental groups concerned with pollution in Santa Monica Bay, said treatment of the water is the only solution.

Constructing a pipe that takes water into the ocean is merely putting the problem “out of sight, out of mind,” said Dorothy Green, Heal the Bay president.