The roots of the A.K. Warren Water Resources Facility run much deeper than its sleek buildings might suggest.
The modern-looking, low-slung complex situated just east of the 110 Freeway on South Figueroa St. in Carson plays a key role in Los Angeles County’s sewage treatment and remediation system.
Its namesake, Albert Kendall Warren, was a surveyor and civil engineer for the County. In 1923, together with Los Angeles Assemblyman Hugh Pomeroy and County Board of Supervisors chair R.F. McLellen, he came up with the idea of a countywide network of sewage plants linked to a main treatment plant. They created what we now know as the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.
The plan offered local control to its member cities, and a larger regional solution for final waste disposal.
Built in Carson in 1928, the Joint Disposal Plant at 24257 S. Figueroa St. was the final stop for human biowaste brought to the facility through a series of tunnels, known as trunk sewer lines, from other plants throughout the county.
In its early years, very little processing of the waste material was done; it mostly went to directly to landfills.
After years of public debate, construction began in 1935 on the White Point sewage outfall project along the San Pedro coastline. This entailed the creation of a huge tunnel linked to the Carson plant that would carry the sewage to an undersea outfall area located roughly 1.5 miles offshore from present-day Royal Palms State Beach. The sewage then would be released in the 200-feet-deep waters of San Pedro Bay.
Funding for the massive $2.8-million project came from the Public Works Administration (PWA), an agency created as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The six-mile-long tunnel was completed in 1937. (A second parallel tunnel was built in 1958 to increase capacity.)
All the individual cities had to do at that point was to finance the construction of smaller feeder trunk lines to connect to the larger county tunnels carrying effluent to the White Point outfall.
On Sept. 7, 1949, Mayor Charles Wortham of Redondo Beach told the Daily Breeze, “The South Bay cities have stopped dumping their sewage on their own beaches.”
He was referring to the beach cities of Redondo, Manhattan and Hermosa, who on that day had begun using the County’s White Point option after years of dissatisfaction with operations at the much closer L.A. City Hyperion sewage plant near El Segundo.
A couple decades later, an unexpected new use of the tunnels would lead to environmental disaster. The successful use of the insecticide DDT to kill mosquitos and thus quell malaria outbreaks among Allied troops fighting in World War II resulted in the wider production and use of the substance.
In 1947, Montrose Chemical Corp. began the commercial manufacture of DDT at its new plant on Normandie Ave. in the Harbor Gateway just east of the Torrance city limit. The Montrose plant immediately began dumping unprocessed toxic effluent resulting from its production directly into the County’s sewage system. The deadly chemicals ultimately ended up in San Pedro Bay via the White Point outfall.
The dumping went on for decades. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s environmental call-to-arms Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin), sounded the initial national alarm about the dangers of DDT. Eventually it was determined that the chemical and its byproducts were destroying sea life in San Pedro Bay.
Montrose Chemical closed its DDT plant in 1982. It took years, but the ocean wildlife eventually began to return to more normal levels.
In 1963, the year after Silent Spring was published, the Joint Disposal Plant’s name was changed to the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant in recognition of its efforts to treat liquid and solid waste instead of merely dumping it offshore. This goal would be officially mandated and regulated by the passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972.
The L.A. County Sanitation District as currently constituted includes feeder plants in La Canada Flintridge, South El Monte, Long Beach, Cerritos, Pomona and Whittier, in addition to the main processing plant in Carson.
The Sanitation District initiated the Clearwater Project in 2019, an operation that will modernize and upgrade the tunnel system, some of whose structures date back to the 1930s. Its completion is scheduled for 2027.
Sources:
California Water Environment Association website.
Daily Breeze archives.
Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts website.
San Pedro News Pilot archives.
