Is Regional H2O Board Poised to Put End to Some Local Septic Tank Use?

• Action on Civic Center Commercial Area Set for October

BY BILL KOENEKER

The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board will consider a ban on septic systems in the Civic Center area of the City of Malibu at a public hearing slated for Oct. 1 at 9 a.m.
The meeting will be held in the board room of the Metropolitan Water District at 700 W. Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Copies of a tentative resolution with the proposed amendment, a technical staff report, including five technical memoranda and an environmental staff report containing substitute environmental documentation, including an Environmental Quality Act analysis, are available for public scrutiny.
The proposed action or amendment, according to the RWQCB staff notification, is “to stop and prevent impairment of groundwater and surface waste in the Malibu Civic Center area.”
“This proposed regulatory action would help restore beneficial uses designated for groundwater, Malibu Lagoon and nearby beaches. The prohibition would also reduce public nuisance resulting from reliance by many commercial OWDS dischargers on tanker truck transport for a portion of the sewage generated by activities on their sites,” the state agency’s notice states.
The proposed prohibition would affect existing and future on-site wastewater dischargers, including Malibu Valley, Winter Canyon and adjacent coastal strips of land and beaches, according to the RWQCB.
Types of systems that would be prohibited range from passive systems with conventional septic tanks to active systems that more aggressively remove pollutant loads from sewage before subsurface disposal. The prohibition would apply to systems that serve individual properties, (residential, commercial, industrial and public properties) as well as groups of those properties, according to the RWQCB staff.
The prohibition would immediately prohibit all new discharges and would prohibit discharges from existing systems within five years from the date of adoption by the board, according to the notice.
An exemption would allow for “zero-discharge” projects, if a discharger can demonstrate that reuse, evaporation and or transpiration will use 100 percent of the wastewater generated by activities on a site will not contribute to the rise in the water table and will contain and properly handle any brines and/or off-specification wastewaters that cannot be reused/discharged that meet established standards, according to the report.
A summary of evidence found in the draft technical staff report written by RWQCB staffer Wendy Phillips asserts that permitted dischargers have a poor record of compliance with board orders. She said that pathogens and nitrogen in wastewaters impair underlying groundwater as a potential source of drinking water, though groundwater in the Civic Center is not an existing source of drinking water as a future resource, “in the event of a disruption of deliveries of imported water, groundwater is an important local resource.”
Pathogens in groundwater did not meet the drinking water standard and nitrogen in the groundwater does not meet the drinking water standard. The data were taken from test wells in the Civic Center, according to the report.
Pathogens in wastewater that are in hydraulic connection with beaches are a significant source of impairment to water contact recreation.
“Staff determined that pathogens from wastewaters migrate to source waters and that consistent with data supporting the designations of impairments, the levels of pathogens do not meet standards protective of human health. Staff also determined that risks of infectious disease from water contact recreation were elevated at beaches in the Malibu Civic Center area versus comparable beaches with sewers,” the report notes.
Nitrogen loads in wastewater flowing to Malibu Lagoon are a significant source of impairment to aquatic life.
Dischargers with unsuitable hydrogeologic conditions for high flows of wastewater resort to hauling liquids sewage and sludge to communities that have sewer and wastewater treatment facilities.
“In 2008, ten dischargers whose activities generated a total of approximately 28 million gallons of wastewater (77,000 gallons per day), hauled almost two million gallons (5500 gpd) or about seven percent of their raw sewage to off-site disposal facilities,” Phillips wrote, indicating the ten dischargers have cumulatively increased their rate of wastewater generation by 15 percent and their rate of hauling by 29 percent.