It’s a Holiday and Beaches Clear Decks for Summer

Toby Tyler has his big red smile, rosy red cheeks and sequined nose ready for Memorial Day weekend. Over the last few months, he has made his painted face, which pops like a colorful ball out of his black clown costume, a fixture on the Santa Monica Pier.

The last several weeks of sunshine witnessed Tyler’s dress rehearsal. Now it’s show time.

“This weekend is the opening of summer,” the self-employed street entertainer announced from his favorite spot, next to a wood piling near the entrance to the pier, adding: “My tips will double.”

Even though Southern Californians go to the beach year-round, Memorial Day starts the beach season, when the Valley girls gear up and head for Zuma, fishermen to Las Tunas, surfers to Surfrider and windsurfers to Leo Carrillo.

Up and down 31 miles of coastline this week, some crews at the 20 public beaches operated by Los Angeles County have continued grading and retrenching sections eroded by winter storms, while others finished hauling lifeguard towers from their winter berths back down to the waterline, set out 3,000 new trash barrels and rushed to finish giving beach facilities a fresh coat of paint.

Extra sand sifters--trucks that comb the sand for glass, cans and other debris--go on duty this weekend, and extra garbage details begin picking up 30 tons of refuse a day from the beaches--double the amount collected in winter months.

“This is our biggest week,” said Wayne Schumaker, chief of safety and sanitation for the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, as his crews did extra cleaning of the beaches before the weekend.

Last year, 55,893,551 people went to the beach--an admittedly fanciful number the county lifeguard division gets by eyeballing the crowds every day and adding up their guesses. This weekend, Howard Lee, assistant chief of the lifeguards, said, “Depending on the weather, we could end up with 1.5 million for these three days.” Once again this year, people will pay $4 for beach parking.

The lifeguards have 37 new yellow trucks and one new rescue boat, Lee said, and as of this weekend will start building up their work force toward the 250 men and women who will handle the summer crush. This year for the first time, a few lifeguards have additional training from health officials to collect samples of any suspicious substances they see discharged from storm drains on the beaches, for later analysis and investigation.

County work crews have put up new railing at Redondo Beach, a new restroom near Venice Pier, and are rushing to complete buildings planned for Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey. Such major projects are only done during the winter months, and the county tries to finish them by June 1, according to Larry Charness, chief of planning for the beaches and harbors department.

“There’s none of that in the summertime,” he said. “The policy is not to perform repairs and replacements which would interfere with public access.”

One effort to replenish sand lost to erosion at Dockweiler will be ongoing, however, as about 600,000 cubic yards of sand are being transferred there from the nearby Hyperion sewage treatment plant.

“Some of the beaches have taken a beating as far as erosion,” Schumaker said. After this winter’s severe storms, the beach area south of Redondo Beach Pier has shrunk to “only about 75 feet width,” he said. He noted that Will Rogers Beach in Pacific Palisades, and Zuma and Surfrider beaches in Malibu also lost considerable sand.

Those beaches are not getting imported new sand, Schumaker said, but his crews are using large bulldozers every day to “push up sand from the ocean side, and build up the beach that way.”

Despite persistent reports of sewage spills and pollution in Santa Monica Bay, “presently there is no indication of any problems along the coast,” said Richard Kebabian, chief of recreational health programs for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

The only exception is Marina del Rey Beach, which has been closed since last October, he said, “because of high bacteria counts” not caused by sewage.

“The rest of the coast is open, there’s no problem,” Kebabian said. “As a precaution I think people should remain approximately 100 yards away from any storm drains that are discharging.”

These drains are not discharging sewage, he said, but “normal street runoff.” Two drains that seem to be constantly discharging, he added, are one at the Santa Monica Pier and another about a half mile south of there.

A team of seven lifeguards has been trained to take suspicious samples from drains, Lee said, because when the guards see foul-smelling or discolored material flowing out, “in the past, we’d call health services, but by the time they get there, oftentimes whatever the substance was is gone.”

Health officials have been instructing the lifeguards on how to determine “the kind of things that warrant taking a sample,” Lee added. “We can get a sample, call them, and they can come and pick it up.”

In other new developments, the lifeguard stations are now hooked into the 911 system, and people can now call that number for beachfront emergencies.

And a new policy is in effect restricting the use of lifeguard rescue boats for emergency assistance only, Lee said, which means no more tows for boats that are simply out of gas.

The rescue boats’ prime purpose is “to help lifeguards on the shoreline make rescues in the surf,” Lee said. “The change of policy is to keep the boats focused on emergencies and really do the job they’re supposed to be doing.”

There were seven drownings last year, Lee said, and lifeguards performed 7,063 rescues. While the July 4 weekend draws bigger crowds than Memorial Day, riptides are more common at this time of year

“What they do is just pull people directly out to sea,” Lee said. “When people step off a shallow spot into deep spots, they end up in a riptide, they can’t stand up and they wash out.”

The beaches most prone to riptides, he said are west-facing ones, such as Santa Monica, Venice, Dockweiler, Manhattan and Hermosa.