Sea Dumping Halted as L.A. Tries Trucking Sewage Sludge Away

Los Angeles has quietly stopped pumping mountains of sewage sludge into Santa Monica Bay, at least temporarily shedding its dubious distinction as the only West Coast city to still dump sludge in the Pacific.

Since last week, a fleet of 40 to 50 rented trailer trucks each day has carried the sludge--the mud-like black goo left when most water is removed from sewage--from a treatment plant on the coast near Playa del Rey to landfills in West Covina and Valencia, city officials confirmed Wednesday.

The city faces a Dec. 31 deadline to halt its longtime practice of piping the sludge, produced at the Hyperion treatment plant, seven miles out to sea and dropping it into a deep-water canyon. The ocean dumping was stopped 10 days ago to test the trucking-landfill system.

Although the sludge pipeline turn-off is officially only “temporary,” the ocean sludge-dumping era could be over if no major snags develop, city officials said.

Activists Skeptical

“It’s a day-to-day proposition,” said Don Smith, a consultant retained by the city to oversee the entire sewage disposal system. “We really don’t know all the problems yet.”

However, environmental activists, who have seen the city miss several deadlines to stop dumping sludge, were skeptical Wednesday. “It’s just a trial run,” said Ellen Stern Harris, a Westside activist. “A lot could still go wrong.”

Sludge has been the focus of a decade-long controversy over the city’s disposal of sewage and waste water in the coastal waters of Santa Monica Bay, which is the summer playground for residents of a vast area from Ventura County to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Some scientists blame decades of dumping sludge for damaging fish and other marine life in Santa Monica Bay and raising the levels of bacteria found along beaches. Stopping the sludge dumping could relieve much of the political pressure on local officials, including Mayor Tom Bradley, over the condition of marine life in the bay.

An end to sludge dumping has also been eagerly awaited by a team of scientists enthused about the rare chance to study what happens to a sea bottom when a major source of pollution is suddenly stopped. Little more than some worm colonies exist now in the submarine canyon where the city’s waste has piled up for decades, and the scientists plan to measure how fast normal life returns.

In a 1980 consent agreement in federal court, the city had promised the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that the sludge dumping would stop by July, 1985.

Deadlines Missed

That agreement was later changed to give the city until February, 1986, to stop sending sludge into the ocean. But the city was unable to meet either deadline.

Sludge is removed from raw sewage during treatment at the Hyperion plant and sent through a series of processes that consume some of the organisms that make sewage a threat to human health. It is dried into a “wet cake” the consistency of mud before being loaded onto the trucks for disposal at the landfills.

The city plans to eventually burn the sludge in the $150-million Hyperion Energy Recovery System plant under construction at the Hyperion plant. Completion of the plant, which will dry the sludge and burn it to generate electricity, has been delayed several times, and city engineers are not sure when the plant will be finished.

As a backup method to dispose of sludge, city officials had hoped to send shiploads of the stuff to Guatemala, where a firm wanted to convert it by composting into a soil fertilizer. But that deal fell through when Guatemalan officials objected.

The entire daily load, about 1,100 tons, is now trucked up the freeways and buried at the BKK landfill in West Covina and the Chiquita Canyon landfill in Valencia, Smith said.

In the 10 days that the sludge has been trucked, city engineers have learned that it was more difficult than expected to coordinate the sludge operation with the routine running of the Hyperion plant, which must continue to process about 400 million gallons a day of raw sewage, Smith said.