Data on Pollution of Ocean Doubted : Environment: The National Academy of Sciences calls reporting fragmented. Answers to safety questions on swimming and seafood are inadequate, experts say.

The National Academy of Sciences said Tuesday that the monitoring of ocean pollution off Southern California is so fragmented and uncoordinated that people cannot be certain it is safe to swim in the water or eat local seafood.

The academy’s National Research Council said there is a “glaring need” to coordinate public and private ocean monitoring along the Southern California Bight, which stretches from Point Arguello north of Santa Barbara to Ensenada in Mexico and varies in distance from the shoreline.

“Only through . . . an integrated systemwide approach can environmental and human health objectives . . . be successfully attained, assuring that it is safe to swim in the ocean and eat local seafood,” said Charles A. Bookman, director of the council’s Marine Board, in a memorandum accompanying the report.

Bookman emphasized that the report was not an environmental assessment of the health of Southern California’s coastal waters but was limited to pollution-monitoring capabilities.

The academy said that despite similar past requests for a regionwide monitoring system, little has been done.

Significant sources of chemical and biological waste from natural drainage and storm water discharges have not been adequately monitored, the report said.

In addition, budget cuts have hampered long-term monitoring programs by the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation, the report said.

The council also said there are no formal methods for integrating findings from fragmented monitoring programs, or for developing a coherent picture of the full extent of ocean pollution off Southern California.

Without such information, it is difficult to tell whether efforts to correct the problem are effective, the report said.

Much of the information collected now, Bookman said, comes from business and industry, which have permits to discharge wastes into the ocean. Other information comes from the monitoring of public sewer outfalls.

Bookman said none of these efforts are coordinated. They also fail to take into account pollution from natural runoff and storm drains, the impact of which equals or exceeds industrial and sewage discharges, he said.

Public concern about whether it is safe to swim or eat local fish is understandable, he said.

“We need to gather information about the environment differently,” Bookman said. “We need to add to our highly detailed permit-by-permit approach a reasonable framework that will allow us to develop a better understanding of the environment.”

The report drew an immediate reaction from the American Oceans Campaign, a private, nonprofit environmental group with offices in Santa Monica and Washington.

Robert Sulnick, the group’s executive director, said the report vindicates a long-held view that more extensive and coordinating pollution monitoring is required.

“You have to do it on a regional basis to get anything meaningful, or what we have here is a walking time bomb in terms of health effects, food chain effects and ecosystem effects,” Sulnick said. “It all starts with understanding what kinds of toxics are in the water. We don’t know and we don’t have an approach to find out.”

He added: “There’s no question that toxics are the single biggest threat to the health of coastal waters, which are the life force of the ocean.”

The total annual pollution monitoring costs to business and government is at least $17 million, the council said.

Bookman said that a regionwide monitoring program could be undertaken for little or no increase in spending by reallocating funds.

“That would involve some very difficult, hard negotiations between federal, state and local levels,” Bookman said.

Bookman cautioned that monitoring alone will not safeguard public health. “We can learn a lot about environmental conditions in order to answer those questions. But assuring that the ocean is safe requires management action,” he said.

Sulnick, who supports Proposition 128 on the November ballot, known as “Big Green” by its supporters, said the initiative would set up a comprehensive ocean pollution monitoring system.

He said he believes the release of the academy’s report was “coincidental” to the election campaign.