Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 28, 2009
4. Water Quality –
Coast Guard proposes ballast water rules
Contra Costa Times
Laguna Fined for Sewage Spill to Ocean
Laguna Beach Independent
New Web site provides water quality of California beaches
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers
San Diego Union-Tribune
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Coast Guard proposes ballast water rules
Contra Costa Times-8/27/09
The Coast Guard on Thursday proposed national standards for regulating the release in port of ships' ballast water, which can introduce new, sometimes detrimental species to U.S. ecosystems.
The plan would establish a limit on the number of invasive organisms that can be released along with a vessel's ballast water while the ship is in port. That limit would initially follow a formula used by the International Maritime Commission—a standard adopted by some states, but considered weak by many environmentalists.
The goal is to establish by 2016 a national standard similar to California's, which is considered 1,000 times more stringent than the limits set by the international commission's formula.
Ballast water helps keep ships stable while they take on or unload cargo. Vessels can acquire ballast water in home ports or elsewhere, taking in microrganisms and fish along with it and carrying them to new places.
For years, environmentalists, particularly in the Great Lakes region, battled for tougher restrictions. They increasingly relied on individual states to adopt standards of their own, a complicating factor for shippers and less effective in fighting off unwanted species.#
Laguna Fined for Sewage Spill to Ocean
Laguna Beach Independent-8/28/09
By Rita Robinson
Water quality regulators levied a $70,680 fine against Laguna Beach, reduced from a maximum potential fine of $5.9 million, as retribution for a 590,000-gallon spill of raw sewage that flooded onto the beach and into the ocean at Bluebird Street last October.
The spill could have been averted by a half-hour's worth of maintenance to ensure that a discharge valve was tightly closed, according to an admission by city officials in a report to water quality regulators. The cost of failing to follow through with minor maintenance "is minimal compared to the cost of the clean-up and repairs," states the report by the overseeing state authority, the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board.
"It was a series of things that often leads to a catastrophic event," Brian Kelley, a senior engineer for the San Diego board, said this week. "Almost all the spills I've seen could have been avoided. This was another one."
On Oct 29, 2008, at 2 a.m., a pipe joint gave way at the Bluebird Canyon sewer pump station and pumps subsequently failed due to flooding. At 2:20 a.m., raw sewage started spilling into the storm drain on Galen Drive behind the sewer station at the corner of Glenneyre and Calliope streets. The storm drain runs directly to Bluebird Beach two blocks away.
The maximum fine for violating the federal Clean Water Act and state water regulations amounts to $10,000 a day and $10 per gallon if the spill exceeds 1,000 gallons.
The potential fine for negligence was reduced because spills and beach closures in Laguna Beach have greatly decreased since 2003, when 22 sewage overflows and six beach closures were reported, which Kelley said the water quality board acknowledged. In 2008, there were four spills that closed two beaches.
Since 2001, the year following an earlier $60,000 fine for another spill, city officials have spent $16 million upgrading a deteriorating sewer system of nearly 100 miles of sewer lines, 25 pump stations and a sewer treatment plant.
A long-needed overhaul of the Bluebird pump station was not included in the earlier improvements, although repairs, which began in March, were planned even before last October's spill occurred.
"They know we've been trying to upgrade our sewer lines over the years," said Mayor Kelly Boyd, "and I think that's the reason they didn't give us the fine they could've given us. When you consider what it could've been and what they fined us, I think we were lucky.
"We were not aware that these were not properly placed," Boyd said of the faulty pipe connections. "When they were installed, there was a system they were sup- posed to use to make sure they stayed tightened down and they didn't do that. Since the '80s, that thing had been functioning without any problems at all."
The impetus for those improvements, according to Rick Wilson, coastal management coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, was outraged environmental groups. "The city had a poor sewer spill record back in the '90s," said Wilson, "and a lot of environmental groups, including Surfrider, made a big deal out of that. Despite the most recent spill, there has been a better record in more recent years."
The seriousness of the problem started the day before the spill when one of two pumps was replaced at the sewer station, according to a staff report submitted to the City Council on Nov. 18. The shut-off valve for the other pump was not turned off tightly enough, creating unmanageable pressure surges on the faulty pipe connection from which the massive amount of sewage ultimately spewed.
Concluding that the city had "a moderate degree of culpability for this spill," the report says that city officials were well aware of potential problems. In addition, the report outlined measures that, if taken, could have prevented or reduced the spill's volume: ensuring the proper installation of a coupling replacement back in 1993, replacing old valves earlier, securely tightening a replacement shut-off valve and having an adequate emergency plan in the event of a major failure.
In April of 2008, the city discovered corroded electrical alarms that are triggered by high levels of sewage, which needed to be replaced, as well as a shut-off valve "in the stuck position for an unknown amount of time," according to the report.
While not admitting culpability for the "un- preventable piping malfunction," the city will not contest the fee, City Manager Ken Frank said in a statement. "While we would have preferred to retain that money for further sewer improvements in Laguna Beach, we recognize that the amount of the fine is reasonable and necessary under current regulations." Frank was unavailable to answer questions early this week.
The fine will come out of the city's $400,000 sewer improvement fund, also tapped to cover the $210,000 cost of the emergency clean-up and temporary repairs.
Renovating the entire pump station is estimated at $1.5 million, said David Shissler, the city's director of water quality. The figure, said Shissler, is a starting number only.
Extensive repairs to the pump station began six months ago. The renovation, by Dudek Engineering of Encinitas, with which the city contracted to renovate the pump station, is expected to be completed by October, a year after the spill.
The Bluebird "lift" station collects all the city's sewage north of Nyes Place and pumps 2.4 million gallons of waste per day four miles through its North Coast Interceptor main pipeline to the South Orange County Wastewater Authority's Coastal Treatment Plant in Aliso Canyon in Laguna Niguel.#
http://www.lagunabeachindependent.com/news/2009/0828/front_page/001.html
New Web site provides water quality of California beaches
Santa Cruz Sentinel-8/28/09
A Web site debuting this summer provides a one-stop shop for people wanting to know the health of a local river or beach.
The online effort is spearheaded by the California Water Resources Control Board and combs data from water agencies and independent research groups across the state.
The site, at http://waterboards.ca.gov/mywaterquality/safe_to_swim/, allows users to select a coastal county, like Santa Cruz, and pin down the conditions of a specific water spot.
Bacteria levels at beaches, what rivers and streams are impaired and water projects underway can be found.
"Particularly for people out of the area, it might help people decide which beach to go to," said John Ricker, Santa Cruz County's Water Resources Division director. His office provides much of the raw data included in the state Web site.
A county Web site, which links off the county's home page http://www.co.santa-cruz.ca.us/ by clicking "Beach & Bay Advisory", provides much of the same information, but in a different form.
Ricker said the county plans to update its water quality information to make it more user-friendly this fall.
The state Web site, according to water officials, is the first of many that will bring various water information to Internet users.#
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_13220996
Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers
San Diego Union-Tribune-8/27/09
By Michelle Rindels (Associated Press)
A tawny stuffed puppy bobs in cold sea water, his four stiff legs tangled in the green net of some nameless fisherman.
It's one of the bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean.
Most of the trash has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether it's sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it.
During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected. The team announced their observations at a San Diego press conference Thursday.
"It's pretty shocking – it's unusual to find exactly what you're looking for," said Miriam Goldstein, who led fellow researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego on the three-week voyage.
While scientists have documented trash's harmful effects for coastal marine life, there's little research on garbage patches, which were first explored extensively by self-trained ocean researcher Charles Moore just a decade ago. There's also scant research on the marine life at the bottom of the food chain that inhabit the patch.
But even the weather-beaten, sunbleached plastic flakes that are smaller than a thumbnail can be alarming.
"They're the right size to be interacting with the food chain out there," Goldstein said.
The team also netted occasional water bottles with barnacles clinging to the side. Some of the trash had labels written in Chinese and English, hints of the long journeys garbage takes to arrive mid-ocean.
Plastic sea trash doesn't biodegrade and often floats at the surface. Bottlecaps, bags and wrappers that end up in the ocean from the wind or through overflowing sewage systems can then drift thousands of miles.
The sheer quantity of plastic that accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex formed by ocean and wind currents and located 1,000 miles off the California coast, has the scientists worried about how it might harm the sea creatures there.
A study released earlier this month estimated that thousands of tons of plastic debris wind up in the oceans every year, and some of that has ended up in the swirling currents of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, told the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society last week that plastic actually does decompose, releasing potentially toxic chemicals that can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and marine life.
The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle?
Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year.
The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger.
"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Only humans are to blame for ocean debris, Goldstein said. In a blog entry posted a day before the science ship arrived in Newport, Ore., she wrote the research showed her the consequences of humanity's footprint on nature.
"Seeing that influence just floating out here in the middle of nowhere makes our power painfully obvious, and the consequences of the industrial age plain," she wrote. "It's not a pretty sight."#
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/27/us-sci-ocean-junk-082709/
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