San Juan Creek - Already One of the Most Polluted Bodies of Water in California

JG: Right. If you spend more money on reclamation, you're not only getting a source of fresh water, you're not pumping as much shit into the ocean anymore. With desal, you're one, exacerbating urban runoff and two, you're ignoring solutions that give you fresh water and resolve some of your treatment discharge problems.

CD: That's great logic.

JG: Here's how we know it's going to exacerbate these problems. Getting desal water is twice as expensive as water from any other source -- some sources it's four or five times as expensive. And so the only willing buyers of desal water that we know of are big developers. So in the case of Huntington, actually in their environmental study, they refused to identify where that water was going. But through some investigation, we found that they had contracts with Santa Margarita water district.

CD: That's the district that would supply the Mission Viejo developments at the top of the Trestles and San Mateo watershed.

JG: So Santa Margarita is where all the huge development proposals are just waiting for a source of water before they can begin construction.

CD: So this water from Huntington wouldn't go to Huntington, it would supply 14,000 homes above Trestles.

Trestles' San Mateo Creek -One of the Least Polluted Bodies of Water in California
Why? Little to No Urban Runoff Keeps the Place Surfable Even During Rainy Season

JG: Huntington -- they might like this desal plant, but Huntington is not going to be drinking any of that desal water or spreading it on their lawn. It's going to all run down San Mateo Creek into Trestles.

CD: Wow.

JG: And nobody is coming from San Clemente to Huntington to comment on this thing and say, 'we don't want your water coming down into our area'. You only have the developers saying 'we do want your water coming into our area'.

CD: It seems like that additional development runoff will have quite an effect on San Mateo Creek.

San Juan Creek's Watershed

JG: And Doheny -- the water will end up here too. You've already got a huge problem with runoff at Doheny and you're just going to exacerbate it. Before we make the situation any better we're pouring more water on top of it? I don’t think so.

The issue has been raised under the banner of growth inducement. Whether you're in favor of growth-inducement or not, the environmental impacts are those additional things that come with growth and that directly affect your experience in the ocean. What are you going to do with the excess sewage? What are you going to do with all this polluted runoff that you haven't figured out yet. And if you don't identify who the end users are, you can't identify what those impacts are going to be.

So all we're saying to them is that this environmental study is no good until you identify who the end users are.

CD: Is this one of the things that's holding up all that development above Trestles in Rancho Mission Viejo now -- that they don't have enough water?

JG: It's the only thing that's holding it up. But you've got to tie it back to things like -- where is this sewage going to go? In Orange County's case, the Orange County sanitation district is just now discontinuing their 301 H waiver which allowed them to pump primarily treated (low treated) sewage into the ocean. Now they're on this schedule to move away from that -- but if this new source of water is going to add sewage to that treatment facility, then they're behind capacity even more, before they even fix the current problem.

CD: It's complex.

It gets very complicated because the environmental studies refuse to say where the water is even going.

CD: Are they legally required to say where it's going before they build a desal plant?

JG: That's what we're saying. They're saying that they're not required. And they're saying they don’t need to study the marine mortality rates and we're saying that they do.

CD: Has Surfrider taken an actual position on the plant?

JG: At this point we haven't taken a position on the plant itself. We're just saying that your environmental study is inadequate. You can't permit this thing until you do more studies.

CD: The city just voted to hold this up until December right?

JG: Right the council hearing will be on December 15^th at City Hall at 2000 Main Street in Huntington at 7PM.

CD: What are other issues besides the above and the concerns about bacteria that have recently been raised?

JG: Well, another one we haven't pushed is that it's one thing to draw cooling water from the ocean, but if you're going to start drinking it, don't you need to apply some drinking water standards to the water you're taking in? I'm talking about chemicals, and metals and other contaminants -- I mean Huntington is one of the most polluted sources of water on the coast. But they argue that their reverse osmosis filters will take out all those metals -- but of course what that means is that they're discharging those metals right back into the ocean…

CD: In a concentrated form.

JG: Right. Then you add to that there are 18 of these things proposed on the coast. Not only do we not know what one of these is doing, but we don't have any idea what the cumulative impacts are going to be. They're talking about one in San Diego, Carlsbad, San Onofre, El Segundo, Oxnard -- I mean they're just everywhere. And we just don't understand these things very well.

Here's something too with the plant in Tampa Bay… When this company, Poseidon who wants to build this thing in Huntington, when they first came around, they said, 'we've got experience in this, we built this place in Tampa Bay'.

Well, now Tampa Bay has failed and they're saying, 'well, the failure isn't our fault, we got out of that before it started having problems'.

CD: What's wrong with the one in Tampa Bay?

Well, they're getting so much marine life and particulates in there that they're clogging everything up. So they're having to use all these chemicals to backflush their filters and system. So now they've got chemicals storing and piling up on the property because they don't have a place to keep them. So they just shut the whole thing down.

But what that means for Poseidon is; when you first came to town, you were telling us that you were the pros. And now you're telling us that you don't have anything to do with that Tampa plant? Well, either you're the pros or this is a brand new experiment that you really don't know anything about. But you can't have it both ways.

And here's another point. They have growth projections out to the year 2020 for this region. They're saying that water demand justifies doing this desal. But the truth is, you sell all this water to Santa Margarita, it's gone next year. You're not going to have any left over for the year 2020. And they also say, well, if we could get off our reliance on water from Northern California and the Colorado River, then we can see some benefits to those environments. Well, if you drink it all up in new construction, you're still drawing the same amount of water from Sacramento and the Colorado as you were last year.

CD: California is not going to suddenly become generous with their allocation of water, so why is that going to change?

We're just going to keep on offering more living space until we've used up every drop. None of this Huntington Beach water is going to be conserved in the Sacramento Delta.

CD: So where does issue this go from here?

Well, we would like the Huntington Beach City Council to just refuse to approve the Environmental Impact Review -- just say, 'this EIR is inadequate'. And I think that once they actually do an adequate job on the EIR, they'll see that the environmental impacts don't justify this project. Until they do an adequate EIR, that's as far as we want to go. This is a plant that will be here for a long, long time. There's no reason to race into this thing.

EXTERNAL LINKS:

Discuss this on the Surfermag.com Bulletin Board.

LA Times Article on this Topic

That’s a Lotta Clams! Suddenly, nature seems opposed to HB’s proposed desalination plant. -- OC Weekly

Turning Water into Whine -- Environmental concerns stall HB desalination plant. -- OC Weekly