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| Sign that is required to be posted on beaches closed due to a sewage spill. The sign is posted in both English and Spanish. |
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On the heels of an L.A. County audit that revealed over 90% of sewage spills since 2002 were never reported to the Health Department, the Board of Supervisors adopts recommendations to repair the spill notification process. These recommendations are fully supported by Heal the Bay.
On Tuesday, January 30th, the Board of Supervisors took decisive action to protect public health at the beach by adopting recommendations to streamline the County's spill notification process.
The Board's action was prompted by the County auditor-controller's January 24th report disclosing that more than 90% of raw sewage spills in L.A. County since 2002 were neither officially recorded nor cleaned up (L.A. Times article - Jan. 25). The audit also provided 15 recommendations to address the failures in the spill notification process which were adopted by the Board at their January 30th meeting.
What the Audit Discovered
Specifically, of the the 208 sewage spills since 2002 (totaling 11.9 million gallons), only 19 were properly reported to the L.A. County Health Department, leaving over 9.7 million gallons of spilled raw sewage unaccounted for.
The audit pointed out that communication breakdowns in the sewage spill notification process resulted in spills not being adequately reported by cities, contractors and agencies or acted upon by the L.A. County Health Department (L.A. Times article - Jan. 26).
Notification Failures Put Public Health at Risk
The end result of this catastrophic failure in the spill notification system was that the L.A. County Health Department closed beaches after only 2.6% of the over 200 spills investigated in the County audit (California State law requires closure of impacted beaches after every raw sewage spill — see sidebar at right "Protecting Public Health"). Thus, whenever there was a raw sewage spill to the Bay, the likelihood of adequate public warnings was trivial, needlessly and unknowingly endangering beachgoers' health (L.A. Times Editorial - Jan 28).
Positive Steps
We are encouraged by the Board's response to an issue that has been critical to Heal the Bay for over a decade, and we fully support the recommendations.
In fact, Heal the Bay has highlighted our concerns about spill notification in our Annual Beach Report Card every year for the last five years. The audit's recommendations, if fully developed and implemented, address our concerns and will result in better protection of public health. |
