For Malibu beach users and surfers, the forecast for Thursday, November 11, 1999 could not have been better (uncharacteristic Indian summer weather combined with a nice south westerly swell). What a perfect way for families to spend a rare weekday holiday at the beach.
But upstream, the operators of the Tapia Water Reclamation Facility had other plans. Sometime before sunrise, they pulled the lever, discharging a reported 10 million gallons of treated water into Malibu Creek. This water rushed into a lagoon already filled to the brim with Tapia effluent, artificially breaching the sand berm at high tide, releasing a witch's brew of pollutants into the surf zone.
Suddenly, for those who unknowingly later ventured into the water, their day at the beach was about to become analogous to swimming in a cesspool. According to data collected by the City of Los Angeles, coliform bacteria levels of Surfrider's near-shore water went from negligible the day
before the discharge, to more than four times the levels, constituting beach closure on the day of the event.
Welcome to paradise
For people the world over, Malibu is the image of California surfing. It is the beach where Gidget met Moondoggie. Where John Milius set Big Wednesday. Where Dora once ruled. Where the Surfrider Foundation was first formed.
But to understand Malibu's dilemma, we must begin to think of it in a different way. Not as simply a beach, or a wave. But imagine it instead as a force field, continually charged by energy born out of, and perpetuated by, conflict.
Malibu has always been blessed by natural beauty and its well-chronicled perfection point surf. It is also cursed by being the natural corridor between the urban sprawl of Santa Monica and Santa Barbara.
Holding the line at the turn of the century against the
This Just In!
In a win for the environmentalists,on December 9, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board adopted new, more stringent requirements for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District's Tapia Water Reclamation Facility regarding its discharge permit for Malibu Creek.
connection of these two dots on the map was the Rindge family, who fought State and County officials over right-of-way through their private Malibu rancho. They erected high fences and hired armed men on horseback to keep out trespassers and survey parties. Out gunned by commercial interests, in 1928, the Roosevelt Highway (now Pacific Coast Highway) steamrolled through and Malibu was laid open to the world.
Back then, Malibu's creek was a typical Southern Californian creek, with little or no flow during the hot dry summers and a rapid flow that scoured the creek's bottom and reef every winter. At its base was a lagoon, a saltwater estuary, that flushed well, and clean water that steelhead returned to when the sand bar at the river mouth was opened by the winter rains.
Today, we still have a wonderful, albeit crowded point
break, but at the base of a creek that serves as an urban sewage shed. The main contributor is Tapia, a facility built in 1963 to treat both sewage and storm drain runoff. Tapia was strategically placed in the creek bottom to take advantage of the natural drainage available from falling water. Its construction was necessary because over the past 100 years, about 80,000 people decided to occupy the 109 square mile area that drains into lower Malibu Creek. Tapia was the key that unlocked the door to massive urban expansion in the watershed.
Degradation of the watershed reached its current epic proportions in 1989, when the California Coastal Commission, stating that it couldn't "... obstruct inland expansion," allowed Tapia to increase its discharge from 10 to 16.1 million gallon during dry season months.
("Another Sad Day in Paradise", continued on page 14)
By Jeff Duclos and Hersh Farerow
