Water Quality at California Surf Breaks Is a Government Failure Hidden Behind Environmental Regulation

Stormwater Runoff, Agricultural Discharge and Municipal Sewage Enter the Ocean at Breaks Whose Quality Government Agencies Monitor But Do Not Adequately Protect

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

MALIBU / SANTA MONICA — The water quality data at California surf breaks tells a story that the state’s environmental regulatory apparatus has been documenting for decades while failing to resolve: stormwater runoff carrying bacteria, heavy metals, and pollutants from urban streets enters the ocean at breaks where surfers spend hours in the water; agricultural discharge from Central Valley operations works its way into coastal waters through groundwater and river systems; aging municipal sewage infrastructure discharges partially treated effluent during storm events at treatment facilities whose upgrade has been deferred for fiscal reasons; and the beaches adjacent to storm drain outlets — predictably, consistently, and measurably — produce elevated illness rates in surfers who surf there after rainfall.

The Stormwater Problem as Government Failure

California’s stormwater management system was designed for an era of lower population density, less impervious surface coverage, and infrastructure investment capacity that has not kept pace with urban growth. When rain falls on Los Angeles’s approximately 800 square miles of urban development, it hits impervious surfaces — roads, parking lots, rooftops — rather than the soil and vegetation that would filter and absorb it. The runoff picks up petroleum residues, heavy metals from brake dust and tire wear, bacteria from animal waste, and whatever else resides on urban surfaces, and channels it through the storm drain system directly to the ocean — untreated, unfiltered, deposited at outlets that are often adjacent to or within surf breaks. The Ballona Creek outlet at Marina del Rey, the Malibu Colony storm drain, the Santa Monica storm drain outlets — each is a documented contamination source that produces water quality advisories after every significant rainfall event. The advisories warn surfers not to enter the water for 72 hours after rain. The advisories are issued every time it rains. The problem is not being solved. It is being disclosed.

The regulatory framework that governs stormwater discharge — the Clean Water Act’s NPDES permit system, California’s own water quality regulations, the Regional Water Quality Control Boards’ permitting authority — establishes legal requirements that municipalities are required to meet. Many do not meet them. The enforcement mechanism — fines, compliance orders, consent decrees — is real but slow, and the capacity of the regulatory agencies to force infrastructure upgrades that cost billions of dollars is limited by the fiscal reality that the municipalities responsible for the upgrades are also fiscally constrained and have deferred the infrastructure investment in favor of other municipal priorities that have more immediate political salience than surf water quality.

The Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force

The Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force, which conducts volunteer water quality testing at surf breaks throughout California and the United States, has been documenting contamination conditions at specific breaks for years and producing data that supplements the government’s official testing program with the specificity and frequency that regulatory agency testing budgets do not provide. The volunteer testing data has in multiple cases identified contamination events that official monitoring missed and has provided the documented evidence base for enforcement actions against specific discharge sources. The data is public. The contamination is real. The regulatory response is slower than the contamination. According to the Surfrider Foundation, over 50 percent of tested sites in California show periodic water quality impairment that would qualify as an advisory-level contamination event under official testing criteria. Surfers who are in the water daily at these locations are making a health risk calculation — often without full information about the specific contamination conditions they are entering — that the regulatory system has not made unnecessary because the regulatory system has not cleaned up the water.

The Property Rights Approach to Water Quality

The libertarian analysis of ocean water quality focuses on the tragedy of the commons structure: the ocean is unowned, so no one has a property interest in its cleanliness that creates a legal right to seek damages from those who degrade it. If surfers had a legally cognizable property interest in clean surf water — if they could sue the municipalities whose stormwater systems discharge into their breaks for the health costs of the contamination — the municipalities would face the same incentive to invest in stormwater management that a polluter facing liability for downstream property damage faces. The public trust doctrine provides some of this framework: the state holds coastal waters in trust for the public and has legal obligations to protect their quality. The enforcement of these obligations has been insufficient, which is the standard outcome when the entity responsible for enforcement is the same entity responsible for the violation. According to Antiwar.com‘s commentary on government environmental failures, the pattern of government agencies both creating and managing environmental harms without adequate accountability is consistent across multiple policy domains. The ocean is not an exception. The surfers swimming in the runoff are not an exception. The regulatory apparatus is doing its best with the resources and will it has. The water is still dirty after rainfall. These things are all simultaneously true.

For more on water quality, regulatory failure, and the politics of clean surf breaks, visit The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/