Life’s Not a Beach for County’s Lake Lifeguards but They Like It : Santa Fe Dam: Inland rescuers take pride in eliminating alcohol- and drug-related drownings. They are still snubbed, though.

In a county that boasts internationally known beaches like Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu and Zuma, lifeguards at the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Park know their workplace might seem like the Siberia of the sands.

“The beach guards snub the lake guards,” lifeguard Jim Hughes said as he and fellow guard Dave Dobbels on a recent workday cruised the gray-sand, crescent-shaped beach in the central San Gabriel Valley.

“Beach Blanket Bingo” it’s not. The Santa Fe Dam, rather, has been the host of country music festivals with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis.

Beach guards have their aura of daring surf rescues, while the park guards recently were lauded for their dutiful ticketing of inebriated bathers.

Located in Irwindale, square in the middle of Los Angeles County’s smog belt, the 70-acre man-made lake has no name. Instead of being a showplace for the latest in Spandex and sunglass fashion, it is the kind of place where bathers show up in makeshift swim attire, Hughes said, gesturing toward two young women emerging from the lake clad in T-shirts and cutoffs.

“This beach is for people who don’t have back yards,” he said. “A lot of them come from lower-income families and never have been in a pool.”

And sometimes there are sanitation problems--but not from storm drains that plague the coastal beaches.

“We’ve even caught people washing diapers in the water,” Hughes said. The lake, which opened in the mid-1970s, is chlorinated to combat bacterial infection.

Still, the lifeguards say their water workplace is in many ways an oasis. Set in a semidesert flood plain in the San Gabriel Mountains foothills, the rocky berms that form the dam shield 120 acres of parkland from a world of junkyards, machine shops, warehouses and Irwindale’s noted gravel pits.

“Not even the Board of Supervisors have a lake view,” Hughes said, gesturing to the smooth, dark-green waters and cloud-shrouded mountain vista looming beyond.

Even though they may be Rodney Dangerfields compared to their higher-profile surf-rescue colleagues, Hughes said the five full-time and 35 part-time Santa Fe Dam guards now can claim a small bit of glory.

Los Angeles County officials on April 5 gave them a Department of Parks and Recreation award for anti-drinking enforcement efforts, which, the lifeguards say, have eliminated all drownings due to drugs or alcohol abuse since the program started in 1989.

The cornerstone of the program is the issuing of citations; in 1990, lifeguards wrote 1,144, about half for alcohol violations, compared to a handful of tickets annually written before the campaign began. The aggressive approach far outstrips the ticket output at the county’s two other, much larger lakes--Castaic Lake and Puddingstone Reservoir in San Dimas.

Before the program, there were several alcohol- or drug-related drownings at the lake each year--four reported in 1988 alone.

“We have a unique problem with shoreline drinking,” said Gordon Gray, the Santa Fe Dam lifeguard who helped develop the program with Craig Lumb, a part-time lifeguard.

“We’d much rather cite a guy than give mouth-to-mouth to somebody who’s had 10 beers,” Hughes said.

In many ways, the county’s 160 lake lifeguards inhabit a different world from their 300 surf beach peers. They work for different county departments (Parks and Recreation for lakes, Beaches and Harbors for oceans); make different salaries (up to $50,000 a year for full-time ocean guards, while lake guards make up to $40,000); and deal with crowds from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

The differences are even reflected in their equipment. The other day Hughes and Dobbels were cruising the beach in a 4-wheel drive vehicle that was a hand-me-down from the county guards.

Still, few of the lake guards aspire to join their more glamorous counterparts on the shore.

“I’d rather be inland anyway. The cost of living is a lot cheaper,” said Dobbels, 27, as he drove along a rocky, dirt road near the shallow lake, which is stocked with trout and catfish.

Dobbels, who once worked as an ocean lifeguard in Orange County, spoke glowingly of the three-bedroom condo he recently bought for $131,000 in nearby Azusa. A comparably priced unit near the beach? Forget it.

Even though they toil in a lower-profile environment, the lake guards deserve the respect of everyone, said Don Rohrer, chief lifeguard of Los Angeles County’s Department of Beaches and Harbors. “Anybody who’s had the opportunity to be a lifeguard on a lake,” he said, “will never say anything critical of our brothers on the lakes.”

Besides, Hughes said, lake guards are in the middle, not the bottom, of the lifeguard hierarchy. “Lake lifeguards,” he said, “snub pool guards.”