Winter water fails

Jenny Marder

Surf City’s beach grades on Heal the Bay’s 13th annual beach report

card would get any child grounded for at least a week.

Huntington’s beaches -- both city and state beaches -- scored F’s

across the board for wet season water quality testing, according to a

report released Wednesday by Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based

environmental group devoted to cleaning up California coastal waters.

Every year, the group doles out A through F grades to all

California beaches, focusing separately on dry and wet seasons.

The report takes samples from more than 400 beaches statewide.

Eight of the 102 monitoring stations in Orange County are in

Huntington Beach. There are two sets of dry season samples, one that

monitors the summer season from April to October, and another that

monitors the beaches year-round. Grades are assigned based on health

effects to swimmers and surfers.

While most of Surf City’s beaches earned A’s, with a couple B’s

and C’s, in the dry season, all eight of the beaches tested in

Huntington Beach scored F’s for rainy weather testing.

“Water quality is always going to plummet when it rains,” said

Hallie Jones, a spokeswoman for Heal the Bay. “But in Huntington

Beach, for all of the sites to get F grades, that is pretty rare.”

When it rains, water flows down gutters, into storm drains and

into the ocean, Huntington Beach Marine Safety Lt. Mike Baumgartner

said.

“Anything that people drop on the street and that drips from cars

will eventually flow into the ocean,” he said. “People kick dog fecal

matter into the gutter, people over-fertilize their lawn, trash --

all that stuff flows out.”

Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, said poor water

quality during the wet season is not surprising for a city like

Huntington Beach, where the Santa Ana River flow, which carries huge

amounts of plume and pollution, is so vast.

Huntington Beach was not alone in its poor wet season grades. Of

the 291 locations monitored, 64% received an F during wet weather.

“This year, wet weather was the worst it’s ever been,” Gold said.

“Looking at the data and speculating, what we found is that we didn’t

have a high number of rainy days, but most of the rainstorms that we

had were pretty large storms. These can lead to poor water quality

for a long time.”

The Santa Ana River and the San Gabriel River, both of which drain

into Surf City beaches, collect runoff not only from Huntington

Beach, but from cities to the north, such as Anaheim, Westminster,

Garden Grove, Stanton and Fountain Valley, said Randy Seton, program

director of the of Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit

environmental organization dedicated to protecting the coastal waters

in Southern California.

“Like trickle-down economics, they call it trickle-down runoff,”

Seton said. “All that area’s a watershed because it’s so flat.”

On the bright side, the dry season marks, which cover the period

when most beachgoers are hitting the waves, average in the A and B

range -- a sign of the stark contrast in water quality between the

dry season and the wet season.

“I think that the good news is that Huntington Beach is really

focused on improving water quality,” Gold said. He pointed to steps

that the city has taken to improve water quality, such as diverting

runoff through the Talbert Marsh and spending millions of dollars to

improve its sewer lines.

At five testing sites, beaches scored A’s for both dry season

tests: Bolsa Chica State Beach at the lifeguard headquarters,

Huntington City Beach at the Seapoint Avenue bluffs, and 17th Street

and Jack’s Snack Bar and the north side of the mouth of the Santa Ana

River.

Huntington State Beach fared the worst overall, with two C’s at

the Magnolia Street site, a C and a B at the site south of Newland

Street, and an A and a B at Brookhurst Street.

“Overall, Huntington Beach is not one of the cleaner beaches in

the state, but it’s not quite as polluted as its reputation,” Gold

said.

Gold also pointed out that Surf City’s neighbor to the south,

Doheny Beach, which stretches more than two miles from North Beach to

Poche Beach in Orange County, is the most polluted in the entire

state. Doheny topped the list of the worst beaches in California to

win Heal the Bay’s notorious “Beach Bummer” crown.

“Every county needs to do a better job on reducing storm-water

pollution,” Gold said. “Especially in Southern California beaches,

where people are swimming and surfing all year.”

* JENNY MARDER covers City Hall. She can be reached at (714)

965-7173 or by e-mail at [email protected].