As a former Planning Commissioner and presently a Public Safety Commissioner and a 45-year resident of Malibu, I have paid attention to all the finger pointing. Even the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project scientists believe that current fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) monitoring may not be able to predict human health risks because the FIB method does not distinguish natural sources from human.
There are too many other sources of enterococcus, e.coli, and total coliform in the environment. The US EPA, State Water Board and other agencies are so convinced of this that more than $20 million has been spent on source-tracking studies to find a reliable predictor of risk. It is foolhardy to base a legal case, prohibition or a massive fiscal investment on FIB samples that Federal, State and water quality experts no longer believe are predictive of risk.
Carol Randall