He recalls seeing a dairyman running water down a street gutter that was brown from washing out corrals and pens. But if you're a water consumer in Orange County and you see the water all around streets down here, I'd be pretty upset, too. Robert Holub is a senior engineer at the state's Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, which regulates and inspects Chino Valley dairies. So far, clean-up efforts have worked like a push broom at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Two desalting plants have yet to materialize, although one is under construction.
New proposals are ambitious or ominous, depending on the perspective.
A pilot project under discussion would hook some dairies into sewers that treat washwater like municipal sewage. The water quality board is bulking up its inspection staff. Some proposed spending relates to dairy waste. But the whopper in this equation is a new set of permit regulations adopted in mid-August by the water board. The new rules say dairymen must remove manure scraped from corrals within 180 days and must figure out how to dispose of long-stockpiled stacks of manure by 2002.