On Friday, January 8, 2010, Heal the Ocean filed with the State of California its report on the results of a two-year oceanographic and microbiological study of the Montecito Sanitary District (MSD) outfall.
“Monitoring the Microbiology of the Montecito Outflow Wastewater Plume,” is a report on an intensive project that tracked the travel of wastewater once it is discharged into the ocean off Butterfly Beach in Montecito. The study was funded by a $330,000 Proposition 50 grant from the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) - one of the first research grants of its type ever awarded!
The UCSB scientists contracted by HTO for the project were oceanographers Libe Washburn and Carter Ohlmann, as well as microbiologist Dr. Trish Holden and her laboratory team. From November 2007 through November 2009, the scientists visited every week, by boat, the end of the MSD outfall, where they deployed GPS drifters to computer-map where the sewage plume travels. Ocean-water samples were then taken from the spots where the drifters drifted, and the samples were sent to Dr. Holden’s lab at UCSB to for DNA and bacteria analysis.
HTO also raised additional funds to send ocean-water samples to the USC laboratory of Dr. Jed Fuhrman for virus testing, as well as PhyloChip analysis in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California. The PhyloChip can scan for thousands of disease-causing microbes in a water sample and can determine definitively if human bacterial pathogens are in the wastewater plume.
The outfall study report filed today contains an executive summary that outlines findings. The full suite of water collection and drift results can be viewed 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, drifter tracks in 10-minute increments; 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.
According to HTO executive director Hillary Hauser, the wastewater “plume” study is the first of its type to be conducted in California. “The study will help us understand what wastewater is or isn’t doing to the ocean,” she said. She also explained that because the UCSB scientists lost about six months of analysis work due to a temporary State funding freeze, HTO has raised additional funds (thanks to the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation) for the scientists to work six more months on “mining the data” - most notably the results of the PhyloChip testing - to produce a final, revised report by June 2010. The report filed today (Friday) fulfills HTO’s contract with the State of California under the terms of the Proposition 50 grant.
“We thank the state of California for entrusting us with this most important research project!” said Hillary. “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.”
Thank you for helping,
