Sounding Off

Don McGee

We harm ourselves with the waiver

Here we are almost three years later with the beach closed and without

a clue. Then, it was the birds who were suspect (of which there were

few), or runoff (never mind it was summer and the river was low). Now

supposedly a bathroom is the culprit. Three years later and our

understanding remains perplexingly dazed and confused.

In September 1999, I read that a spokeswoman for Orange County

Sanitation District said that fruit was dumped into the Talbert Channel

to track where the runoff from storm drains ends up.

Shouldn’t they have already known this? What else has not crossed

their minds? Since then, numerous people, including Mayor Debbie Cook,

asked why they have not done a dye study. This would be relatively cheap

($150,000), compared to the $5.1 million study completed this summer.

The latter a study purportedly designed to test the hypothesis that

the influx and reflux of 300 million gallons a day (soon to be 600

milligrams) of ocean water used by AES could be assisting the tides,

currents, and wind in moving the plume ever closer to shore.

Problem being that the ill-fated study was done while AES was

basically shutdown for retooling, making the results inconclusive and

moot. Conspiracy, garden variety disorder, or just supreme snafu? I live

just a hop, skip, and a dump from the offending orifice of the outfall,

and I would like to know.

This issue has been on the radar for quite a while now and it appears

we are no closer to the truth than we were three years ago; in fact we

may be farther from it than ever because of a grotesque display of

subterfuge by those clinging shamelessly to an outmoded agenda.

I, and others, have wracked our brains in a frustrating and somewhat

futile attempt to understand the reasoning behind the sanitation

district’s rapacious pursuit of the waiver.

Two of many possible scenarios:

1. corporate polluters somewhere up the line that would be forced into

cleaning up their act because what they are dumping would interfere with

the treatment procedure that the law requires (sans waiver).

2. A dunderheaded allegiance to an antiquated policy that has enabled

the sanitation district to accrue over half a billion dollar surplus of

our money.

It is obvious that some still erroneously and incomprehensibly believe

that the ocean at our doorstep is infinite and should be used as a

toilet. It has been noted that a civilization can be judged by the

distance one puts between their self and their excrement. Given this,

isn’t it time we discard our delusion that dilution of pollution is the

solution?

Feb. 11, the monitor closest to the beach (half mile) sounded the

alarm that the plume that could not move was indeed gravitating toward

shore.

A call to arms was trumpeted, a press conference was hastily convened,

and the Orange County Sanitation District announced that immediate

remedial action was to be taken. Get rid of the waiver -- right? Wrong.

Their position is to cling to the waiver and dump thousands of gallons

of bleach, or acid, or an agent to be named later into the mix. A

short-term solution that will undoubtedly create a great many problems of

its own.

Three years, millions spent on studies, which in the past have been

ignored, or worse, buried, and where are we? Is this a preview of what

the new millennium has to offer?

Is this the best the agencies designated to protect us can do? Have we

indeed met the enemy and it is us?

* Don McGee is a Huntington Beach resident. To contribute to Sounding

Off, fax us at (714) 965-7174 or send an e-mail to hbindy@latimes.com.