Editor’s Notebook -- Danette Goulet

How much more do we need to hear before deciding once and for all that

the enormous plume of waste dumped a mere 4 1/2 miles off shore should be

fully treated?

Why do we need any convincing in the first place? If hundreds of

millions of gallons of sewage are to be pumped into the world’s greatest

resource each day wouldn’t common sense suggest we clean it up first?

And let’s not use money as a reason not to do it. Government, whether

it be city, county, state or federal, seems to find money for everything

else.

Now, I don’t consider myself an environmentalist sort, but even if

that plume of waste doesn’t make it back to shore, it’s just dead wrong.

At the rate we are consuming this Earth, we can no longer afford this

out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality.

We certainly can’t claim ignorance of the life and ecosystems in the

ocean, where we are discharging this toxic plume of bacteria and disease.

Do we need to wait until it is proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt,

that surfers are riding plume waves and children are splashing in

bacteria soup?

The thought of dumping our sewage out the window and into the street

as they did in medieval times is vile and outrageous to us, and yet we

dump 243-million gallons of it four miles out into the ocean that we take

food from and swim and play in.

A study was released by researchers from UC Irvine and Scripps

Oceanographic institute in La Jolla a couple weeks ago that found the

plume to have traveled four of the 4 1/2 miles back toward the shore.

The study debunked a long-held theory that the sewage is trapped far

below the surface by a layer of warm water. So, basically the whole shaky

premise that made it OK to dump a plume of sewage is gone.

Then, last week, tests of the water off the state beach at Magnolia

Street show it is polluted. There must be a crack in a sewer line, we’re

told. Health care officials were baffled this week to find that there are

no cracks.

What could it be?

Gee, do you think it might be the sewage we just happened to dump a

couple miles off that same beach?

One last thought -- how is the Environmental Protection Agency, which

issues the waiver that allows this polluted plume to be dumped,

protecting the environment by issuing such a waiver.

Now there’s one agency that needs to change its name.

* DANETTE GOULET is an editor with Times Community News. She can be

reached at (714) 965-7170 or by e-mail at o7

danette.goulet@latimes.comf7 .