A Letter to the Community from Mr. Malibu

Dear Malibu Community, Pepperdine, and City of Malibu:

What is Clean Water?

As many of you may have seen, Pepperdine filed a lawsuit against me regarding a video that showed water gushing into the ocean with a torrential amount of suds indicating contents of more than just rain water. Pepperdine does not operate the sewage facility that appeared to be upstream of the outflow.  Pepperdine built that facility to process its sewage near the campus- but L.A. County operates it.

When I apologized for webcasting the video and accusing Pepperdine, the lawsuit was dismissed and I received wide ranging comments from "how did the crow taste, was it served with suds?" (to which I responded "best crow I ever had!.. more suds coming right up.") to "everyone thinks you're a hero." 

I did not want to be a hero or an activist, I simply wanted to bring the water to people's attention and I did not intend to malign Pepperdine's name. In light of what was learned from the many points of view, I would like to propose a solution to City of Malibu commercial sewage processing in central Malibu and Pepperdine's sewage processing. Since Pepperdine already has pipes going to Tapia, we should re-route all of Pepperdine's sewage and all of commercial Malibu's sewage back to Tapia under the proviso that Tapia is never again permitted to discharge down Malibu Creek, but instead, sell the water to places in the valley that will pay for it, like golf courses. Pipes to accomplish this have already been installed under an Obama Administration initiative.

"Filtration" systems along the coast are questionable at best and we need to protect the ocean once and for all. The real problem is the E.P.A.'s acceptance of the label "Title 22" water as acceptable to discharge into streams and the ocean. Title 22 does not address heavy metals, other  bacteria and viruses, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals deemed harmful to the environment.

However, by the time systems are upgraded to remove all of this, it would be much more practical in my opinion to simply re-route all the above mentioned sewage to Tapia so that only one main facility would be required to upgrade its purification processes -- Tapia. It appears that the E.P.A. needs to be taken to task on the label Title 22.

Cary ONeal
(Mr. Malibu)