Water Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency is obliged by the Clean Water Act to protect the nation's waterways, beaches and drinking water from pollution caused by real estate development and should set standards for limiting construction runoff by the end of next year, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The ruling from the U.S.

Hoping to help clean the waters at local beaches, the Laguna Beach City Council this week approved a water pollution control plan for the city. The plan calls for the city to meet with representatives from the county and other agencies to discuss pollution-testing protocol for streams and beaches and to step up a campaign to educate residents about how to avoid polluting local waters, especially Laguna Canyon Creek.

A federal judge has approved a settlement in which the Environmental Protection Agency agrees to set pollution limits to make waterways and beaches safer in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong signed the agreement that ended a lawsuit filed by the environmental groups Heal the Bay and Santa Monica Baykeeper against the EPA.

Blond-haired Scott Daley has built his fearless reputation by slashing and ripping across the world's gnarliest waves. Monster surf? No problem. It's what is potentially in the waves that frightens him. "If we don't do something about the deteriorating conditions of our oceans, sooner or later our beaches will be closed," the Hermosa Beach local said. Daley is trying to deal equally fearlessly with what he sees as a mounting threat to the shores of America.

Assemblywoman Sally Tanner (D-El Monte) claimed a major victory when she persuaded Assembly and state Senate committees last month to put $900,000 in the state budget to stem the pollution of ground water in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys. But at the behest of Danny Walsh, a member of the state Water Resources Control Board, whose responsibilities include the protection of ground water, the Senate committee dropped the allocation from its version of the budget, leaving Tanner furious.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials Friday defended their decision earlier this week to name the city of Burbank a possible polluter of its own ground water supplies, but would not say what evidence backs their conclusion. "It's not necessarily the same amount of evidence we would need to win in court," said Marcia Preston, assistant regional counsel for the EPA in San Francisco.

For more than a decade, the California Department of Transportation has been a chronic violator of federal laws designed to prevent enormous amounts of polluted water from running off highways into rivers, streams and the ocean.

Federal environmental officials have reached an agreement with 44 companies to investigate the extent of ground water pollution in the severely contaminated Puente Basin in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. The firms, including TRW Inc., United Technologies and BDP, a subsidiary of Carrier Corp., have committed to paying for the investigation, which is estimated to cost from $2.5 million to $4 million and take one year to complete.

Authorities Saturday lifted the last water pollution alerts that were posted when an estimated 30 tons of chemical poisons were dumped into the Rhine River. The water pollution alerts were called off for two towns in the Rhine Palatinate. They already had been lifted for the states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia.