Last Sunday lots of raw sewage were flushed into my old stomping grounds, the South Bay of Southern California. Apparently, a pumping station failed in Manhattan Beach and the stinky mess spilled out around there (outta manhole covers, onto the beach, and into a few homes). It must've been a slow newsday for the incident to make the NPR newscast on Monday, which is how I first heard about it.
Well, 1.7 million gallons of backed-up sewage is nothing to sneeze at. Fortunately, only a fraction of that (about 100 thousand gallons) flowed into the ocean and polluted the southern part of Santa Monica Bay, from Manhattan Beach to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
This reminds me of another famous effluent spill in the vicinity. If you follow the coastline along the PV peninsula, around the corner of Point Vicente, there's a 17 mile square area of ocean real estate, nearby, that contains the world's largest known deposit of DDT (about 100 tons).
For almost 20 years (late '50s to early '70s) effluent from a South Bay DDT plant flowed through the local sewer into the ocean just north of the LA/Long Beach harbor. 1700 tons of DDT, were the estimates. From other plants, tons of PCBs joined in the pollution.
(Makes the Chesapeake Bay's pollution seem like an mild headache.)
Posted by raacluse at January 18, 2006 10:46 AM