Research Institute Sets High-Water Mark : Ocean of Money Devoted to Resource Purity

FOUNTAIN VALLEY — Founded less than a year ago as the vision of a wealthy woman who wants to do something about conserving a vital natural resource, Orange County’s National Water Research Institute is rapidly building a reputation to match its ambitious name.

Despite its youth, the institute has already begun to attract national attention. In an era when environmental problems are gaining worldwide priority, the nonprofit research group is making a mark with its determination to find practical solutions.

“While everyone listens to people talk about saving the earth at the U.N. conference in Rio de Janeiro, a small organization in Orange County is quietly taking action,” observed Kris P. Lindstrom, a Pacific Grove environmental consultant.

The institute, which was conceived and bankrolled by Irvine Co. heiress Joan Irvine Smith, is dedicated to finding new ways to purify the nation’s water, whether in rivers and oceans, underground or in the atmosphere.

A bare-bones operation, the institute has no building of its own. Its two-person administrative staff, consisting of a director and secretary, occupies an office at the Orange County Water District plant in Fountain Valley.

Nonetheless, with the ability to fund about $2 million a year in research, the institute is fast becoming a significant player in supporting studies aimed at applying emerging scientific methods for solving water supply and contamination problems.

Studies have been launched to develop the use of hydrocarbon-hungry bacteria to clean up oil spills, to remove the reddish brown color from otherwise usable drinking water supplies and to employ gene probes to detect disease-causing viruses and bacteria in ocean water frequented by swimmers and surfers.

In recent weeks a portion of the water flowing in the Santa Ana River has been diverted into six newly formed ponds above Prado Dam in Riverside County as part of an institute-supported effort to create wetlands with the optimum combination of plants and bacteria that will digest polluting nitrates in the river water.

The aim of the experiment at Prado Dam is to remove the nitrates from the Santa Ana River before they seep into the ground basin from which Orange County pumps much of its drinking water.

Alex Horne, a professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley who is leading the nitrate cleanup experiment, said he hopes it will also enhance the habitat for wetland wildlife, including deer, amphibians, ducks and the least Bell’s vireo, an endangered species of songbird.

Horne, who expects to receive $151,000 from the institute for the two-year project, said most research funding agencies “don’t want to mess with applied research.”

“You don’t get Nobel Prizes for this research,” he said, “but it is so satisfying if it works.”

The National Water Research Institute’s keen interest in funding practical scientific research projects has made it attractive to water researchers nationwide, especially in the current recessionary climate that has dried up many government funding sources.

“They are a very significant player in a very small game because hardly anybody is doing research on drinking water or waste water,” said James Manwaring, executive director of the American Water Works Assn. Research Fund and one of 25 national water experts on the institute’s advisory board.

The institute is believed to be the only privately funded organization dedicated to the full range of water issues. It was established last July with a promise of financial support from Smith, who has had a longtime interest in local water supply problems, and her mother, Athalie Clarke.

Smith’s interest reaches back decades, stemming from her affiliation with the Irvine Co. Founded by her grandfather, the giant real estate development firm increased its water supplies by importing water and tapping into the ground-water basin for farming as well as its slew of planned communities, including the city of Irvine.

With Smith’s encouragement, the institute was formed under an agreement that included the Orange County Water District, the Sanitation Districts of Orange County, the Municipal Water District of Orange County, the Irvine Ranch Water District and the San Juan Basin Authority. These agencies pay all of the institute’s administrative costs.

Ronald B. Linsky, the institute’s executive director, said the fledgling organization is determined to tackle issues with a national scope.

Linsky, a biologist whose long career in water issues has included stints as a member of the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, director of oceanographic research at USC and the University of Hawaii and as director of a United Nations marine institute in Trinidad, began to market the institute nationwide soon after he was hired as its director last August.

The last group of research applications came from “20 states plus Canada.” In addition, the institute recently agreed to help fund five research projects in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the American Water Works Assn., the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the University of California Water Resources Center at UC Riverside and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering.

The institute has invited top water scientists, congressional leaders and federal agency officials to a workshop that begins today in Delaware, Linsky said. There they will help to design a research program to provide information the EPA needs to enforce a ground-water disinfection rule scheduled to go into effect in 1995.

Philip Berger, the EPA’s lead technical person on the project, said the EPA must learn more about how underground water becomes contaminated by viruses so it can decide which wells may be exempted from the disinfection requirement. The rule has important implications in California, which relies more on ground water than any other part of the country.

On another front, an institute-funded research program to develop a speedy, reliable technique for identifying disease-causing organisms in Orange County’s coastal waters is now being expanded to Hawaii and North Carolina.

Carol Palmer, a microbiologist employed by the Orange County Sanitation Districts, which is co-sponsoring the research, said the current practice of sanitation agencies and health departments throughout the country is to routinely count fecal coliform bacteria in ocean water as an indicator of disease-causing pollution.

These public agencies, however, have no practical way to know for certain if there are specific viruses and bacteria in the water that will pose a health problem, she said.

To correct that shortcoming, Palmer said her research staff is developing genetic material that will attach to certain disease-causing bacteria or viruses and show up in an X-ray, thus positively identifying them within a few hours.

Palmer said that until now, this technique has been used primarily in medical laboratories to diagnose diseases in patients by identifying microorganisms in their blood and other fluids.

This summer, Palmer said, she will be using genetic identification to look for microorganisms that cause such diseases as hepatitis in ocean water samples collected at the sanitation districts’ 17 water quality monitoring stations between Seal Beach and Corona del Mar.

She will be joined by scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who will search for pathogens in the water along their own shorelines.

The purpose of expanding the study geographically, Palmer said, is to discover if the method she uses to detect viruses and bacteria in Orange County waters would work as well in waters that are colder or warmer, since the abundance of disease-causing bacteria and viruses is greatly influenced by such factors as temperature, salinity and sunlight.

Similarly, a group of scientists at the Orange County Water District is receiving institute funding to design a “bio-reactor” fueled with hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria that will be capable of cleaning up oil or solvent-contaminated soil anywhere in the country before it seeps into water supplies.

“We want to build something that could be put on the back of a flatbed truck,” said Don Phipps, a microbiologist and chief engineer on the project.

Lindstrom, an environmental consultant who serves on the institute’s advisory board, said the organization can quickly respond to changing research demands because of its streamlined structure.

He said the institute has already racked up an important achievement by forging “some new partnerships between local government entities, university researchers and private industry willing to step up to the table and contribute.”

Nonetheless, the institute ultimately will be judged by the results of its research. Said Manwaring: “The proof of the pudding comes later.”