I am not proponent for or against septic systems in Malibu. My residence and most others in the Malibu watershed that are on septic systems work quite well, but as a surfer who knows the local shore lines very well, I have to straighten out Jack Singleton’s ignorant remarks on our watershed hydrology.
He implies that because septic systems are subterranean, water/human waste cannot enter the watershed, nor flow toward the ocean. Even a high school student who has taken a geology class knows about water tables and the different hard rock strata that prevent water from permeating “directly down toward the center of the earth via gravity,” and traveling laterally to a path of less resistance, perhaps to a “ Malibu Creek Watershed” or the ocean.
Jack, take a walk below the older stilted houses in eastern Malibu at low tide and you can smell the lovely stench of human waste leaching laterally and maybe you can see the slimy sludge dripping onto beach toward the ocean we swim in. Maybe you think the houses on Colony Road near the lagoon don’t have leach field problems when there are extreme high tides. I have worked on a house there and seen toilets that could not be flushed at times, and seawater that had backed up into the house, overflowing the toilets onto the floors and mixed with human sludge because the tide was too high in the lagoon’s water table. When seawater flows into a leach field it also flows back out, back out into our watershed, back out into my surf spot.
Or maybe you can tell me why sometimes the Cross Creek commercial areas leach fields overflow “up” through the septic pump-out manhole covers with that putrid smelling effluent, that has ruined a lot of appetites on their way to that fine Italian restaurant. Tell me that septic overflow pollution doesn’t trickle across the parking lots, into the storm drains, the creek and the ocean. Show me a list of creek shore or beach shore residences or commercial owners who volunteer to have dye testing done on their septic systems. I will give you a dollar for every one who has volunteered. I guarantee you will not get rich from your knowledge of watershed hydrology and “subterranean” geology.
Steve Woods