Monitoring the Microbiology of the Montecito Outfall Wastewater Plume

Heal the Ocean received a $333,000 state grant for a revolutionary oceanographic and microbiological ocean outfall study that followed a plume of wastewater discharged into the ocean just off of Santa Barbara’s coast.

The "Shallow Ocean Wastewater Outfall Source Tracking Project" (SOWOST) is one of the first research grants of its type ever awarded by the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), applying cutting-edge DNA technology to the subject of shallow sewer outfalls.

The SOWOST study is focusing on the Montecito Sanitary District outfall, the end of which discharges into approximately 35 feet of water, 1,500 feet off Butterfly Beach in Montecito. Paid for by a Proposition 50 Clean Beaches Initiative grant, this is a two-year project that began in November 2007.

The UCSB scientists contracted for the project are oceanographers Libe Washburn and Carter Ohlmann, as well as microbiologist Dr. Trish Holden and her laboratory team. During the first year, the scientists made weekly visits to the end of the outfall by boat, where they deployed GPS drifters. They were able to map the wastewater plume’s movement using computer-based animation. Ocean-water samples were then taken from the drifter’s end position, and those samples were taken to Dr. Holden's lab at UCSB for DNA and bacterial analysis. One hundred percent of the grant funding given to Heal the Ocean was allocated to the UCSB scientists’ work. We continue to raise funds to add more scientific dimensions to this important project. Thanks to generous donations from an anonymous fund of the Orange County Community Foundation, as well as the Ann Jackson Family Foundation and Brian & Laurance Hodges of WWW Foundation, we have been able to send the samples to the USC laboratory of Dr. Jed Fuhrman for virus testing.

We also raised funds (approximately $25,000) to add more frequent PhyloChip analysis of the ocean-water samples. Developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the PhyloChip can scan for thousands of disease-causing microbes in a water sample and can determine definitively if human bacterial pathogens are present in the wastewater plume.

Heal the Ocean believes this Shallow Outfall project, with its sophisticated technology, will significantly advance water quality research and understanding.

HTO policy analyst Priya Verma, a PhD student at UCSB's Bren School, is managing the project. Priya is working closely with SWRCB staff, which came to Santa Barbara to pay a site visit to the MSD outfall site in September 2007 while the details of the project were being worked on by a SWRCB task force in Sacramento.

The computer mapping of drifters (test run began on November 16, 2007) and the full suite of water collection and sampling ten days later, can be viewed on-line at http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/drifter/MSD/index.php. Among the data compiled by the UCSB oceanographers are correlations of discharge rate and temperature (provided by the Montecito Sanitary District); drifter tracks in 10-minute increments; the water depth at each drifter position; the time rate of change of water depth; total velocity; east and north velocity components; and along-shore and across-shore velocity components.

During the second year of the project the scientists compiled the data and produced their final report, which will be published in December 2009.

We thank the Montecito Sanitary District for its help and cooperation on this project, and we are deeply grateful to the state of California for entrusting us with this most important research! We are convinced that the advanced oceanographic technology and state-of-the-art water quality analytic technique being used for this study is an important step toward the ultimate goal of sound wastewater management in the state of California.

HTO is thrilled to announce that Wendy Foster is helping to raise funds AND awareness by carrying our new line of women’s tee-shirts in her three local stores.

Angel
1221 Coast Village Road 565-1599

Wendy Foster
833 State Street 966-2276

Pierra la Fond
516 San Ysidro Road 565-1505

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