Check goes to fine cause

Andrew Edwards

More than one-third of a fine assessed against the Orange County

Sanitation District will go toward a program to monitor ocean

currents, if the agency gets its way.

The sanitation district wants to contribute $60,000 from the

$160,000 levy to the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing

System, a high-tech effort to monitor ocean currents from San Diego

to Point Conception, said Bob Ghirelli, the sanitation district’s

director of technical services.

The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board fined the

sanitation district for a sewage spill that occurred last year over

Labor Day weekend.

The sanitation district mailed a $100,000 check to the water board

in late December, officials in both agencies said. The water board

allowed the sanitation district to spend $60,000 on an environmental

project.

Approval of the sanitation district’s plan is pending, water board

spokesman Kurt Berchtold said. The system would use land-based,

high-frequency radar installations to monitor currents and automated

underwater vehicles to track water quality, sanitation district

senior scientist George Robertson said.

“The idea is from Catalina Island on in, we’d have a direction of

the surface currents,” Robertson said.

The sanitation district’s $60,000 would pay for about half the

cost of one radar installation, Robertson said.

The Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System’s

participants include the Scripps Institute of Oceanography,

universities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. USC marine studies

professor Burton Jones, who oversees the radars, said most of the

system is expected to be operational by the end of the year.

The system’s primary purpose will be to monitor pollution by

tracking the flow of discharges into the ocean, Jones said.

Scientists also expect it will have uses for search-and-rescue

teams tracking the trajectory of someone adrift, or could also be

used by sailors tracking currents and surfers watching for waves.

The sewage spill happened on Sept. 4, when a power outage led to

1.6-million gallons of treated wastewater flowing into the Santa Ana

River, closing beaches in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.

The water board could have fined the sanitation district about $16

million but assessed a lower fine because the sanitation district is

not a repeat violator, and because of the unusual cause of the spill,

Berchtold said.