RESOURCES
Stopping Water Pollution at its Source
Keeping San Diego’s Beaches andBays Safe and Clean
By Ernie Anderson, General Services Director
February 16, 2003
As appeared in The San Diego Union Tribune
San Diego is more than a beautiful city—it’s
our home. Our citizens cherish our beaches, bays, rivers,
recreational waters; in fact, they value them so highly that
in the City’s last public opinion poll they rated keeping
these waters pollution-free as their highest priority.
In response, Mayor Murphy subsequently designated cleaning
up our beaches and bays as goal number four on his administration,
and he quantified that goal by setting a 50 percent reduction
of beach postings and closures by 2004 as a target.
To reach his goal, Mayor Murphy established the Clean Water
Task Force, which assembled scientists, academia, environmental
groups, builders, and the community as a forum to develop
pollution reduction strategies. The City Manager also elevated
the Storm Water Pollution Prevention Program to its own division
in the General Services Department, designating it City’s
lead in water pollution prevention. The City Council doubled
its budget to $3 million for FiscalYear 2002.
The new Storm Water Pollution Prevention Division focused
on five areas: investigation, pollution abatement, education,
enforcement, and additional funding.
Investigation: Pollution prevention focused on pollutants
that are easily identified, easily eliminated, and inexpensive
to address. This phase included testing more than 300 storm
drains, gutters, channels, streams and rivers in San Diego,
with concentrated efforts in and around Mission Bay. Results
revealed that less than 10 percent of beach closures result
from sewage contamination. The majority is due to runoff produced
by our everyday activities: cleaning, clipping, fertilizing
or over-irrigating our yards, applying pesticides, not picking
up pet waste, applying pesticides, and driving or maintaining
our cars.
Pollution Abatement: Information gathered from our investigational
efforts was very productive. Some of the measures taken to
reduce bacterial pollution coming from public areas included
adjusting sprinkler systems and watering schedules and reengineering
recreation vehicle dump stations. We also have become more
aggressive in preventing residential and commercial pollution
by prohibiting construction site and home remodeling residues,
landscape debris, sediment, and restaurant discharges—such
as mop water and debris resulting from the hosing down kitchen
floor mats outside—from entering the storm drains. Early
investigation and remediation efforts have been significant:
we saw a 36 percent reduction in beach postings and closures
in 2001 and a 45 percent reduction in 2002.
Since rainfall is largely unpredictable and unpreventable,
we factor all rain-related postings—called General Advisories—out
of our statistical data. Instead, we focus on and include
what we can control: postings that result from urban runoff
from our homes and businesses, postings due to high levels
of non-sewage bacteria in our waters, and sewage-spill closures.
This method allows us to accurately gauge the effectiveness
of our program, regardless of rain.
Education: Education is most important of our long-term efforts
to reduce water pollution. Many citizens do not realize that
their actions—such as ignoring their leaking cars and
or performing improper pool maintenance—contribute to
the problem. But most people will change their behavior once
they learn about pollution prevention.
The City developed the ‘Think Blue’ education,
outreach and media campaign to teach residents and corporations
about how everyone can reduce storm water pollution. Information
has been made available through television and radio announcements,
newspaper articles, school and community programs and a web
site, www.thinkbluesd.org.
Enforcement: Unfortunately, education is not always enough,
and some citizens and businesses choose to disregard safe
practices and pollute our beaches, bays and watersheds. To
combat the problem, the City developed a Storm Water Code
Enforcement Team, which enforces water codes and standards.
Violators may be issued citations or civil penalties, and
some are fined from $100 to $10,000 a day, depending on the
caustic nature of the pollutant and the severity of the violation.
We encourage you to report any illegal pollution discharges
to our live-operator hotline,
(619) 235-1000, during normal business hours or to our 24-hour,
seven-day-a-week regional recorded hotline—1-888-THINK-BLue.
Additional Funding: The City currently spends $29 million
annually to keep our recreational waters clean, but it does
not provide funds for our most important need: regular cleaning
of the storm drain system. Until we are able to identify the
financial resources necessary to maintain our storm drains,
we will continue to work with other levels of government and
environmental groups to fund investigation and abatement activities
through grants and subventions.
In conclusion, we all must remember that the storm drain
system is at the center of our efforts—citizens must
use it properly, and the City must maintain it. We simply
don’t have the resources to regularly clean the drains
or to construct a new system; therefore, changing our behaviors
becomes that much more important in the battle to clean and
protect our recreational waters.
Ernie Anderson
General Services Department Director
City of San Diego
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