The Chemistry’s Bad for Ailing Aliso Creek

The blunt warning is fixed on a weathered wooden sign at the edge of Aliso Creek: “Stagnant Water No Swimming.”

About 100 yards downstream, where a brownish-green pond has formed near a beach playground, another posted admonition carries an even more ominous message: “Aliso Creek Waters Are Contaminated.”

Yet the signs do little to keep small children from sloshing through the waterway as it winds across the beach to the ocean. Beach-goers and neighbors say the biting smell of hydrochloric acid is becoming all too familiar.

On some occasions, they said, the creek even speaks.

“You can actually hear it popping and hissing when it bubbles up on the sand,” said Tex Haines, who collects weekly water samples for testing along the creek’s meandering 12-mile route, from Trabuco Canyon to South Laguna.

“They see it happen and say, ‘Well, there it is again,’ ” he said about the sounds.

Though the signs have been posted for several years, the heavy rains of February turned a spotlight on Aliso Creek and raised new concerns among city residents.

The storms, which washed away bridges in a nearby resort, are being blamed for rupturing a sewage pipe that spewed more than four million gallons of treated sewage near the shoreline of Aliso Beach. The spill forced county officials to close a half-mile stretch of popular beach for two months. It was reopened April 6.

During a recent City Council meeting, water district officials who had come to explain the pipe repair revealed that the creek water was in some ways more harmful than the treated sewage.

The creek carries runoff from surrounding homes and businesses, and untreated waste such as fertilizers and pesticides reached new highs during the rains.

Residents said the fate of the creek and the ocean water at Aliso Beach are intertwined, because the creek drains regularly into the sea at the beach, a favorite of tourists and skim-boarders.

Larry Honeybourne, an engineering specialist for the environmental health division of the Orange County Health Care Agency, said any pollutants in the creek are quickly diluted when merged with ocean water.

But some residents find little comfort in such assurances. “It’s a toxic body of water, there’s nothing that lives in there, and it dumps into our beach,” said Mary Douglas, a South Laguna Civic Assn. board member.

“You can actually see sewage floating in Aliso Creek as it empties into the water,” she said. “It’s very, very bad, and children don’t realize that.”

Last month, Laguna Beach’s branch of the Surfrider Foundation staged its first meeting to address the pollution. Haines, a foundation member, said he will continue monitoring the creek in hope of pinpointing elusive pollution sources.

“One thing that became apparent really quickly is that the pollution at Aliso is only partly caused by the sewage spills,” said Haines, who added that tests indicate that there are unknown sources of contamination.

“The problem is, no one thought it was important enough to do anything about it,” he said.

The City Council directed a mandate for cleanup last week to the Aliso Water Management Agency, which owns the four sewage treatment plants in the creek’s watershed. The council has asked that treatment and disposal procedures be improved and steps taken to prevent sewage spills.

And activist Beth Leeds is expected to ask the city to form a panel to search for ways to clean up the creek, and to urge the state’s Environmental Protection Agency to make sure that the job gets done.

“The problem with Aliso Creek is it drains a very large watershed area,” said Honeybourne of the county health agency. “It’s a flood-control channel. Its primary purpose is to drain water away as it rains.”

Especially after heavy rains, Aliso Pier provides an excellent vantage point from which to view the trail of runoff to the ocean.

“There’s an area very visible . . . where you just have brown water, as opposed to the blue ocean,” said Mike Dunbar, general manager of South Coast Water District. “It does have an impact on the ocean. As to what extent, that’s hard to say. I don’t think anybody has done any quantitative analysis to see what that impact is.’

However, Chris Crompton, acting manager of the Orange County Environmental Management Agency’s resources division, said the general condition of the creek is not as bad as portrayed by residents and government officials.

“Aliso Creek is not in any way radically different from any other creek in Orange County,” he said. “It is not a toxic creek. It is nothing like that.

“It’s just water you wash down your driveway and overflow (from) your flower garden,” he said. “It’s drinking water that has picked up a few urban effects.”

But some who regularly visit Aliso Beach hold a different view. Haines said the pollutants, with their “curious white bubbling,” are very familiar to beach-goers.

Camm Swift of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County said thousands of tidewater gobys, a fish considered a “species of special concern” by the state Department of Fish and Game, have vanished from the creek.

When he first began studying the diminutive, nondescript fish in 1970, Swift said up to 5,000 of them swam in the lagoon near the mouth of Aliso Creek.

“We went back in 1980, and they weren’t there,” he said. “I kept going back once in a while to see if we missed them or there had been some mistake.

“Most of the animals that depend on that water aren’t there anymore,” Swift said.

Water officials said they know that the lagoon attracts youngsters, but they don’t know what to do about it.

“We’re aware of it,” said Lisa Hogan, the Aliso Water Management Agency’s assistant general manager. “Frankly, we all feel real bad about it.”

Hogan said the agency, which already tests the water regularly, is voluntarily testing more.

On April 23, the agency will hold a special meeting to address issues raised by the City Council about the pollution.