Dirty Water: One Man's Fight to Clean Up One of the World's Most Polluted Bays

4. Squirp

43 chapter 4 Squirp Let’s say hello to propaganda for a moment. For the sake of simplicity and instant persuasion, some enviros at the time initially blurred the distinction between raw and partially treated sewage , dependably evoking visceral reactions from anyone they told that Los Angeles—both city and county—was polluting Santa Monica Bay with, ew, sewage. They knew this automatically created in almost everyone’s mind the not-so-pleasant picture of turds washing ashore while kids played in the surf. In fact, Bennett developed a favorite line for this image, telling reporters, “When I swam, often I tasted things in the water. I thought it was something I ate. I found out it was something someone else ate.” In truth, the Hyperion plant treated the sewage just enough, as Bennett loved to say in interviews, “to separate out the big chunks,” in a process called primary treatment. The raw sewage , after going through screens, was sent to large tanks, where suspended solids either floated to the top or sank to the bottom. 44 / Squirp And the result, a still nasty mixture of organic matter, bacteria, and suspended toxic metals, among other things, poured out the five-mile-long, thirteen-foot-diameter pipe at a depth of 197 feet. Near its end, the pipe split into a Y. Portholes spaced every forty-eight feet along the pipe after this point dispersed the wastewater into what was known as the zone of initial dilution. Here, one part treated sewage was diluted by eighty-four parts ocean water. (The leftovers from this process—the sludge— went through a seven-mile-long pipe and accumulated at the outfall at the edge of the underwater Santa Monica Canyon.) Just the same, these details were hardly as forceful in terms of propaganda as simply saying, as Bennett and others did, that the city daily dumped 420 million gallons of sewage into the bay (actually, Hyperion treated 420 million gallons, and about 25 percent of this received secondary treatment as well, the biochemical process that the Clean Water Act required for the entire volume). Similarly, the name Bennett called his band of protesters, the Coalition to Stop Dumping Raw Sewage into the Ocean, was calculated to elicit strong disgust. In fairness to Bennett, he dropped the word raw after his son, Leif, correctly pointed out it wasn’t really pure but partially treated sewage. However, the propagandist version of the issue could go only so far. Bennett needed a story he could tell. And that required a hero and a villain. A story was especially needed to attract the Fourth Estate, which responded quickly to plotlines of good and evil. However, just a few days into his campaign, all he had for villains were faceless targets—the City of Los Angeles, the city council, the EPA, and the Regional Water Quality Control Board—which were just institutions grinding away in the land of gray, and too slippery to strictly categorize as bad guys. Squirp / 45 He hammered away at them as best he could during his countless phone conversations with potential coalition members. Without a true villain, he ran with the idea that the March 25 meeting was deliberately kept from the public so the 301(h) waiver could go through unscathed. If nothing else, people loved conspiracies. Bennett didn’t realize a villain hid in plain sight. There he was, a tall, handsome man, a former adventurer who knew how to sell his own variety of propaganda. He did it with expert flourish, convincing the decision makers that the bay was doing just fine. In fact, he assured them, the sewage pouring from Hyperion actually benefited marine life. He went so far as to tell people that the waste products of their digestive process—an entire city’s, uh, effluent—actually kept fish and other creatures well fed. This villain—as Bennett and others would come to portray him—was Willard Bascom, who ran the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, or SCCWRP (which most people pronounced “Squirp”). The sixty-nine-year-old executive director (who looked ten years younger) oversaw a crew of some twenty scientists and other researchers who—under an annual million-dollar-plus contract with five Southern California dischargers, including the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County—monitored the bay’s waters and marine life to see how discharges from their clients’ sewage treatment...