This Harbor Cries Foul

When it rains, mats of tangled trash and debris -- some with tentacles 50 feet long and 3 feet thick -- flow down the flood-control channels and foul the marinas. The snarls of urban flotsam are flecked with plastic bottles, Styrofoam and other castoffs.

Water quality plunges as pesticide, chemical and bacteria counts rise. Errant boaters sometimes illegally dump their raw sewage into the harbor. And the silt pours in and settles to the bottom of the waterways, making them shallower.

This isn’t the heavily industrialized Port of Los Angeles. It’s affluent Huntington Harbour in Orange County, a Venice-style enclave of million-dollar homes, 3,500 pleasure boats and inviting pocket beaches tucked along the quiet back channels of Anaheim Bay.

Carved from wetlands four decades ago, Huntington Harbour has long been a symbol of the good life. There’s a yacht club, a Christmas boat tour of decorated estates, and waterfront restaurants and boutiques along the main channel.

But serious environmental problems are threatening the community’s quality of life, and years of unchecked silt deposits have left some places so shallow that boats sit in the mud or cannot pass at low tide.

“Trash, debris, pesticides and toxic metals get dumped into flood control channels,” said Ken Theisen, a staff scientist with the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. “What has happened in Huntington Harbour can happen in any urban watershed. It doesn’t matter how much money you make.”

Huntington Harbour’s residential islands contain about 5,000 residences, some of them luxury compounds that go for as much as $4.5 million and come with a slip for the family yacht.

During warm weather, the harbor’s canals and secluded beaches fill with swimmers and kayakers, many of them children. Flotillas of small sailboats and other craft bob in the main channels with larger sailboats and motor yachts.

Those who work and live in the harbor say they worry about encroaching pollution, the flows of debris in winter, and the silt that is slowly filling the channels.

“Most of the time, the water quality isn’t that bad,” said Clement Aime, who lives in a waterfront condominium with a slip for his cabin cruiser. “But residents don’t want the harbor going to hell. They don’t want the water polluted.”

Although the harbor’s channels and beaches have good water quality most of the year, testing shows that is not true after moderate-to-heavy storms, particularly in the fall and winter.

The degradation occurs as polluted urban runoff, much of it from upstream cities, gushes into the harbor through hundreds of storm drains and three major flood-control channels -- the Bolsa Chica, the Sunset and the East Garden Grove-Wintersberg channels.

The watershed that drains into the harbor is enormous and includes Disneyland’s parking lots far upstream.

Once in the canals and main channel, polluted water and debris become trapped in a harbor that lacks the surf and ocean currents needed to flush out the runoff.

“Enclosed beaches and waterways are the worst performers in terms of water quality,” said Mitzy Taggart, a staff scientist with Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based environmental group.

County health department records show that in 2000, 2001 and 2002, contamination warnings were posted at Huntington Harbour more often than for most of Orange County’s coastal waters. Only Huntington State Beach, Newport Bay, Dana Point Harbor, Doheny State Beach and Poche Beach in South County had more official warnings.

Last month, the federal government added the harbor to its list of impaired bodies of water after the Environmental Protection Agency found unacceptable levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, and dieldrin, a pesticide similar to DDT, that was banned in 1973.

PCBs, which remain in the environment for decades, are organic compounds once used to make electrical equipment, paints, plastics and rubber products. Studies show they can affect brain development in human infants as well as the immune and reproductive systems of larger marine animals.

The extent of the harbor’s water pollution still isn’t known. State water quality officials and Orange County Coastkeeper, a local environmental group, are developing a comprehensive survey of the area. The findings, based on 90 water and bottom samples taken in March, haven’t been released.

Coastkeeper maintains a 22-foot power boat in the harbor to help monitor water quality. This month, executive director Garry Brown stopped the craft near the Warner Avenue bridge, where runoff flows in from the Wintersberg Channel. He recalled that a bottom sample taken here in March emerged from the water as putrid black goo molded around a large amount of trash.

“When we pulled it up,” Brown said. “Everyone grabbed their noses.”

Pollution is only part of what arrives with the urban runoff. The flow also brings in silt, which slowly fills the channels and canals.

A 2000 survey of the harbor identified 10 sites that needed immediate dredging.

About 15 years have passed since the harbor was last dredged, a task that government officials say should be done once a decade. Though the county’s 1994 bankruptcy was initially blamed for delays in dredging, there is still no city or county money available for the job and commercial ports often get priority for federal funds. Officials estimate that about $2.5 million is needed.

Ron Hagan, a special projects director for Huntington Beach, predicts that if the work is not done within the next few years, the number of critically shallow spots could double.

The problem has been complicated by the spread of eel grass, which has taken root in some of the shallows. The plants are protected and must be restored elsewhere if dredging proceeds.

There is also concern that the silt buildup might be so contaminated with toxic metals, pesticides and PCBs that it would have to be trucked to a landfill. Typically, dredgings are disposed of at sea, a much cheaper method.

“Based on the ongoing siltation and the potential of eel grass, this problem does not get better with age,” said Gregory Lee, a corporate executive and resident who serves on a city committee related to harbor issues.

Coastkeeper and Huntington Beach officials say the runoff problem is aggravated by the illegal discharge of raw sewage into the harbor by boaters and people who live aboard their craft, despite a city ban.

Testing by the county health department in 2001, for example, showed dramatic spikes of enterococcus, fecal coliform and total coliform in May, June, September and October for waters in the Huntington Harbour Clubhouse Marina area. The bacteria can cause infection and disease.

Coastkeeper officials say they found 19 live-aboards along a single gangway at one marina during an impromptu survey. They suspect there are scores of others.

A Huntington Beach committee made up of government officials, environmentalists, business people and residents, is addressing the problems and trying to assess the responsibility of residents and upstream cities.

Of about 7.2 million gallons of runoff that flows daily into the harbor during the dry season, about 6 million gallons come from other cities.

So far, the committee has a list of more than 50 recommendations and proposals, including education programs for upstream cities, more pump-out stations, better maintenance of flood control channels, and property assessment districts to raise money for cleanup programs and dredging. The list also recommends licensing live-aboards so they can be policed.

Cities in the watershed “must realize they are all coastal cities,” Brown said. “People up in Yorba Linda need to be reeducated.”

Now in the works are two proposals that would divert dry-season runoff from county flood-control channels into artificial wetlands that would filter the water before release into Huntington Harbour.

The projects, however, would not be able to handle the enormous flows of runoff during the rainy season.

The committee’s director, Huntington Beach City Councilwoman Debbie Cook, said the work has gone well, except that severe financial problems faced by state and local governments will make it difficult to pay for solutions.

“It’s really a tough issue for cities to deal with,” said Cook, whose city recently reduced its staff by 100 workers due to budget cuts. “They support the idea of clean water, but they don’t support paying for it.”