Immersed in Clean Water : On Newport Bay Issues, Agencies Consult a Couple of Quality Activists

Ten years ago, Dr. Jack Skinner became ill after distance swimming in polluted water in south Laguna Beach. He called the Orange County Health Department to find out why the water was laden with coliform bacteria from human waste. He wasn’t happy with the answer.

Skinner learned that boaters were draining human waste directly into the water unchecked and that storm drains allow even more effluent to reach swimmers and wildlife.

He soon recovered, but his wife, Nancy, dates the couple’s career of behind-the-scenes activism on behalf of Newport Bay to that episode.

“Jack said to me, ‘I’m going to learn everything there is to know about Newport Bay and how clean it is,’ ” Nancy Skinner said.

Two years later, Nancy Skinner was appointed to Newport Beach’s fledgling Harbor Quality Committee. Since then, the couple has worked to require pump-out stations for boats and monitoring to make sure skippers do not empty on-board toilets directly into the bay.

They have helped nurseries and farmers upstream along San Diego Creek find ways to recycle nitrate-laden water to reduce the chemical runoff into waterways.

The Skinners have also suggested and followed up on a program to mark Newport Beach storm drains so passersby know they lead directly into the water. And they have made it their business to tirelessly monitor and fight sanitation and water district efforts to relax sewage treatment regulations.

The Skinners have become so expert on the bay’s needs that public agencies now call them.

“They have probably, because of their steadfast concentration on the bay and the water quality, made more difference than anybody else over the last 10 years,” said Councilwoman Jean H. Watt, who started working with the Skinners in the 1970s through a community group, Stop Polluting Our Newport.

“They tackle one thing at a time and bird-dog it. And they’re very nice about the way they deal with people, so they find solutions.”

The couple has testified at federal public hearings that resulted in preserving high-level sewage treatment in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, where sanitation agencies sought to have the rules relaxed. They also helped Nancy Skinner’s brother in Hawaii mount a similar challenge to a waiver request from a sanitation district there.

But most of their efforts have focused on Newport Beach’s most cherished natural resource, the Back Bay.

“I call it Newport Beach’s Central Park. It’s just a gem,” Nancy Skinner, 60, mused as she looked out over the marsh.

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Nancy Skinner learned to swim on the north shore of Balboa Island. Jack Skinner, 63, a physician and director of continuing medical education at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, swam, bodysurfed and boated in Newport Beach as a youth.

The wealth of memories from summers of their own youth and, later, raising two daughters in Newport Beach, are part of what drives the Skinners to take on the enemies of the bay.

There are natural ones, such as algae and reeds, and man-made contamination that includes upstream silt, human waste and storm drain runoff from the bay’s watershed area: Newport Beach, Santa Ana, Irvine, Costa Mesa, Tustin and Lake Forest.

Skinner was not comforted when he called the county Health Care Agency in 1984 and learned the bacteria that caused his illness were from human waste.

“The health department tests the bay every Monday in 26 locations for contamination,” Skinner said. “The results were showing that the bacterial counts were rising every year, especially around Balboa Island and Lido Island and the peninsula. That’s when I got interested in where it was coming from.”

That led to the Skinners’ work on the city’s first ordinance for people living aboard boats. They pushed for more pump-out stations for boaters--there are now 25, up from just one in 1984--and the use of dye tablets to inspect for shipboard septic tank leaks.

That reduced bacteria counts, but didn’t improve water color and clarity. Algae blooms, which feed on nitrates, grew so thick that in 1986 the algae absorbed most of the oxygen in the water and suffocated thousands of fish.

“We started hiking all the tributaries on the watershed,” Nancy Skinner says. Water samples they collected along San Diego Creek and the Delhi Channel pointed to three runoff sources: nursery sprinkler systems, reclaimed water from the Irvine Ranch Water District and flood-irrigated farms.

The Skinners helped city officials persuade the nurseries to reuse their runoff. Farmland has been developed. The water district is again seeking a permit to drain large amounts of nitrate-laden water into San Diego Creek, as part of a water treatment program, but has agreed to study the potential impact on the bay first.

The Skinners, who have testified against the request, fear another fish kill like the one in 1986, or worse. “When we first got into this, there was no algae in the Upper Bay because it was too toxic,” Nancy Skinner says.

Now, algae again carpets the Back Bay floor. Fish are not yet threatened, but birds that ply the shallows at low tide pursue their sand-dwelling quarry only in the mud, in areas clear of algae. Biologists are not sure why.

Arundo, a European reed once grown for use in musical instruments, has become the crabgrass of Newport Bay. The bamboo-like shoots root almost instantly and grow rapidly into thick stands of reeds. The non-native plant threatens to choke the native shrubbery by sheer volume.

“The farmers upstream are cutting it down and leaving it in the creek. We’re trying to get them to clean up their act,” Jack Skinner says.

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The bay’s worst enemies wash in from storm drains in the watershed, which feed channels that flow unfiltered into the bay and dump an incredible variety of refuse.

“What we mostly find are cups,” Nancy Skinner says, pointing to the still-readable address on a paper cup. But they have come across tires, sofas, a television set and a car’s rear axle among the litter. Tennis, soccer and volleyballs are common finds.

“Jack found a wallet one time and called the person who owned it,” she says. “They’d lost it two years earlier in Irvine.”

Recent storms flushed 100 to 200 tons of trash down toward the bay, according to Newport Beach General Services Director Dave Niederhaus.

The bay was also declared off-limits to swimmers and boaters Jan. 13 when a sewer pipe ruptured in Irvine and sent an estimated 1 million gallons of effluent into San Diego Creek, which empties into the bay. The bay was reopened Friday.

Inland development also stirs up dust that washes down the storm channels and collects as silt in basins where boats turn around in the bay. Although the basin has been dredged once within the last decade, it has refilled almost to the water’s surface.

Some silt washes down naturally, but construction grading in the watershed has accelerated the flow of dirt and with it, soil-bound chemicals entering the bay. A report from former state Sen. Marian Bergeson’s office says 2.4 million cubic yards of silt has been removed from the bay since 1982.

In the 1960s, water percolating through a 10-square-mile area drained into the bay, Skinner said. Now, channels laced over 152 square miles feed the bay. And it isn’t always a healthy diet.

“One of the most common pollutants is still DDT,” an insecticide banned by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, Jack Skinner said. It washes down with soil stirred up during the construction of inland housing tracts, especially on property that was once farmland.

Toxins from car exhausts--including chromium, lead and cadmium--are increasing threats. Roads and freeways in the watershed are blanketed with the exhaust particles, which later wash into storm drains.

“It’s called a ‘witch’s brew,’ because it has a lot of chemicals in it,” Jack Skinner said. “As Irvine develops, there will be less concern about insecticides and things related to agriculture and more concern about things related to urban living.”