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

Prologue

1 prologue Surfer Scientist Dr. John Dorsey liked to call it black mayonnaise. That pretty much described the thick mat of sewage sludge that lay on the seafloor some 320 feet below him as he hauled up a sediment sample from the area called Site 8A. The Marine Surveyor, the twenty-year-old boat he had taken to this point seven miles offshore , barely rocked on the early summer seas, and it seemed as though the Pacific Ocean that surrounded him was pure, clean, and untouched. It wasn’t really. Some people called that sludge below him a dead zone, an underwater desert, which wasn’t actually lifeless but was devoid of most of the diverse marine life that once had lived there. Only a few species remained. Near here was the outfall of a seven-mile pipe from Los Angeles’ Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant that disgorged the city’s sewage solids, called sludge, after they had been separated from the rest of the wastewater in large tanks. In 1984, an average 4.8 million gallons per day were pumped through this pipe—which had first started 2 / Prologue operating thirty-three years before—a total of 49,414 tons for the year. The sludge was so thick and heavy it just accumulated on the seafloor, smothering the life that was once there. To be clear, this wasn’t the only source of sewage flowing into the bay. A five-mile pipe discharged the wastewater that remained after the sludge was removed. And a one-mile pipe relieved Hyperion of untreated sewage during plant malfunctions or when the volume reached such immense levels that the facility couldn’t handle it all. This was May 1985. Dorsey, a tall young man who was as happy surfing as he was researching the ocean, had been hired by Hyperion in 1983, after graduating from the University of Melbourne the year before with a PhD in marine biology and pollution ecology (he went to the school because of both a scholarship and the nearby surfing). The advanced degree made him unique among his peers at Hyperion, and so while his primary job may have involved collecting and analyzing data, he was also slated on occasion to testify before various local government entities, such as the city council, and at an upcoming hearing before the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board. There, as he understood it, some agitated protesters were about to declare that the entire Santa Monica Bay, where that seven-mile outfall sat, was polluted, a giant cesspool, because of Hyperion. He figured he could bring a little balance to the clamor by showing that many parts of the bay were still in decent shape. A scientist just presenting the facts. Then again, there was that dead zone of sludge below him. He had just finished cowriting Hyperion’s 1984 report on Santa Monica Bay’s environmental health, which was the first time anyone at the plant had bothered to take the data about the Prologue / 3 sludge and other nearby marine environments and sift it through a scientist’s well-educated brain. Since 1971, Dorsey’s employer, the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, which ran Hyperion, had collected raw numbers on sea life and water quality, but it had all sat in files, unexplained. And now, in scientists’ plain, dry prose, Dorsey and his coauthors had written, “Embedded within the changed area of sea-bottom was a degraded area around the terminus of the 7-mile sludge outfall. Few species occurred here, resulting in very low diversity, abundance, and biomass.” In other words, a dead zone. The biomass, or the total number of living things, had been buried by tons of sludge. He also found elevated levels of cadmium, chromium, and copper. “Sediments at the terminus of the 7-mile outfall were the most severely impacted with concentrations of all four metals ranging from 15 to 65 times background levels,” the report said. Indeed, Dorsey told whoever would listen that the discharge of sludge had to stop (by the way, Los Angeles was required by law to find another, less environmentally harmful place for the sludge, but was continuing the discharge because many in the city government believed the black mayonnaise actually benefited marine life). Nearly as bad was the five-mile outfall pipe, where most of the wastewater landed, about 404 million gallons a day, after the solids...