A few ground rules for saving the oceans

Call it the slobber stopper.

It looks like an elaborate fountain. Water gurgles through a series of red-tiled pools, spillways and chutes within sight of the pedestrian walkway that connects the bluffs of Santa Monica, Calif., with the Santa Monica Pier.

The Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility (SMURRF), is the only thing preventing 350,000 gallons of urban runoff from coursing into the Pacific every day.

The $12 million contraption is at the forefront of efforts to curb the pollutants that threaten the world's oceans. Sitting near the mouth of the city's largest storm drain, it collects and treats the frothy flow that trickles out of a seaside metropolis day after day from sprinklers, washed cars and drained pools, bearing with it cat and dog waste, spilled engine oil, lawn chemicals, brake dust, bacteria and viruses.

The liquid waste, called "urban slobber," is filtered, sterilized with ultraviolet light and recycled to irrigate Palisades Park and a city cemetery, and to flush the toilets at police headquarters. Styrofoam cups, plastic bags and other solid debris are scooped out and hauled to a landfill.

Yet such farsighted ingenuity remains the exception rather than the rule. SMURRF is the only urban runoff recycling plant in the country. Efficient as it is, it captures a tiny fraction of the runoff flowing into California's coastal waters.

Industrial civilization is overloading the oceans with nutrients — compounds of nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous. Algae, jellyfish and other primitive life forms are thriving in this new environment, while corals, marine mammals and many fish species are struggling.

Government and industry officials, with the benefit of scientific studies, can now pinpoint the multitude of pollution sources. They also know how to fix the problems, said Paul Faeth, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. "We've got the tools," he said, "but need the political will to get it done."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for instance, often has failed to enforce the Clean Water Act's requirement to stop pollutants from entering U.S. coastal waters deemed impaired, except when forced to do so by federal courts.

Dozens of cities have spent years and more than $1 million battling compliance requirements in court. In the meantime, many simple and less-expensive cleanup methods have been ignored — including the use of street sweepers to follow trash trucks and scoop up spills.

With its civic image and tourist industry tied to picture-perfect beaches, Santa Monica didn't need a court order to tidy up its coastline.

SMURRF, which began operating five years ago, has shown results. The big storm drain empties onto the sand next to the Shutters Hotel and Casa Del Mar. The popular beach used to get failing grades from ocean-monitoring groups because contaminated waters threatened public health.

Now, with SMURRF intercepting and treating the runoff, the beach gets mostly A's.

Santa Monica diverts most of the flow that SMURRF can't handle to a sewage-treatment plant. Still, there are limits to what the infrastructure can do. In heavy rainstorms, the runoff from storm drains can overwhelm treatment plants and risk spilling raw sewage. City engineers have to release these polluted floodwaters into the sea.

That has prompted Santa Monica and other cities, including Seattle and Portland, to focus on stopping runoff at its sources: the rooftops, roads, sidewalks and parking lots that shed water.

For more than a decade, the city has required new construction or substantial home remodels to maximize permeable areas or set up other ways to keep water from running loose.

It's an attempt to reverse 125 years of engineering and landscaping design. Now, parking lots and driveways are being built from pavers or porous concrete that allow water to pass into the soil. They are lined with planters, built below grade to collect runoff, with trees and shrubs that soak up rainwater.

So far, about 1,200 parcels, about 5 percent of the city's total, have been reconfigured so that during 0.75 inch of rain, 6.1 million gallons of rainwater feeds topsoil or recharges groundwater instead of being whisked to the ocean with the other 110 million gallons.

Fifty miles from the shores of Santa Monica, Mark Lambooy is focused on a cleanup of another kind. Every day, a two-man crew maneuvers a giant vacuum tanker to sweep the feeding lane at Lambooy's Dykstra Dairy in the Chino Valley, nudging aside black and white Holsteins jostling for another mouthful of hay.

With a giant squeegee and powerful suction, the tractor-powered "honey vac" scoops up a green-brown slurry of manure, turning a waste product into a commodity that will be used to generate electricity and then spread on fields as fertilizer.

Dykstra Dairy is in the vanguard of a movement to clean up waste from livestock compounds. The goal is to keep the nitrogen-rich waste out of creeks, rivers and ultimately oceans.

It's an unusual chore on a dairy farm otherwise preoccupied with maximizing milk production, said Lambooy, the co-owner.

One of the toughest agricultural tasks has been to discourage the excessive use of cheap chemical fertilizer, which is manufactured by stripping nitrogen out of the air and altering its chemistry. Although such fertilizer has brought America an unprecedented bounty, it also has caused serious damage to the oceans by creating "dead zones."

In one of the largest lifeless zones, off the coast of Louisiana, fertilizer residue flowing down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico stimulates riotous blooms of algae, which then die. During their decay, they consume the available oxygen in the water, making it impossible for most sea life to survive.

Nancy Rabalais, a Louisiana scientist who studies the devastation off the mouth of the Mississippi, tries to persuade Midwest grain farmers to fertilize in the spring rather than the fall. That way less fertilizer would be swept away by winter rains and snowmelt.

"Most farmers won't do it," she said. "They stick with what they know."

Scientists in Ohio and Louisiana estimated that if just 2 percent of strategically located farmland in the Mississippi drainage basin were returned to wetlands, it would significantly reduce the nitrogen that races into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Department of Agriculture encourages such restoration, and the idea has proved popular with farmers. Yet thousands of those willing to set aside wetlands or plant buffers of grass and trees are turned away each year because of a shortage of funds.

Some dairy farms use manure to fertilize crops, but many others lack enough acreage to spread the manure around. For years, they would pile it up on their property. A lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council spurred state regulators to began enforcing rules to corral manure and related wastewater on site.

Dykstra Dairy decided to join other dairies in an effort to wrest energy from excrement. That's where the "honey vac" comes in, scooping up 36 tons a day that goes to a methane digester at a regional utility.

More than 100 of these methane digesters operate nationwide. The key is to collect manure early, so the gases can be harnessed before they escape into the environment, said Martha Davis, an executive at the Inland Empire Utilities Agency. "The fresher the better."