FOCUS: Orange County Focus is dedicated on Monday to analysis of community news, a look at what’s ahead and the voices of local people. : IN PERSON : He Loves the Water, but Rain Dampens His Day

If it’s raining somewhere in Los Angeles County, chances are Gordon Labedz won’t go surfing in Orange County. And Labedz, a family physician and Seal Beach resident who begins most days on a surfboard, is not easily chased out of the surf.

“I so look forward to it, I don’t need an alarm clock,” he said. “I wake right up at dawn and put on a wetsuit and go right down to the beach--seven days a week.”

But Labedz knows that even the lightest rain in either county can wash some rather nasty stuff--such as pesticides, motor oil and animal feces--into storm drains, where the toxic brew is flushed down the San Gabriel River flood control channel, emptying out at his favorite hometown surfing spot, the 1st Street beach.

“The real danger is that during a big rain, the sewers overflow and they run into the storm drains, so what you’ve got is a heavy dose of sewage that’s washed into the ocean,” Labedz said. “With the elimination of natural rivers and wetlands, nature’s filtering mechanisms have been dismantled.”

A founding member of the Surfrider Foundation, the 10-year-old Huntington Beach-based group that monitors coastal environmental issues, Labedz has spent the last decade warning surfers, swimmers and developers of Orange County’s growing ocean pollution problem.

“We’ve watched the water get murkier and smellier and more full of garbage every year. It’s presently safe to swim and surf at Orange County beaches, except after a rain or in front of a flowing storm drain or river. But southern Orange County waters may soon become as dirty as those in Los Angeles County. Tourists will stop coming to our beaches and more and more people will be complaining about illnesses that they get from the water.”

High levels of bacteria in local waters can cause ear and sinus infections and symptoms that resemble stomach flu, according to Labedz, a 49-year-old associate professor of family medicine at UCI School of Medicine. He advises swimmers and surfers to wait 72 hours after a rainstorm before entering the ocean near a flood control channel, a rule frequently ignored by Seal Beach surfers.

“Back in the mid-’80s, there was a whole number of lifeguards in Santa Monica who came down with various kinds of blood cancers, leukemias and lymphomas,” Labedz said. “That was a clarion call for a lot of us. That created a lot of anxiety about the quality of Southern California waters.”

Although Labedz calls the incident a “red flag” for environmentalists, he said it was never determined whether the cancers were caused by ocean pollution. In fact, Labedz said, the chances of contracting cancer from swimming in the ocean are remote at best.

“Your major risk of getting cancer from the ocean is by eating contaminated fish,” he said.

It is the relentless drive to pave over watersheds and wetlands along with the transformation of rivers into cement-lined flood control channels that have contributed most to ocean pollution, Labedz contended. And the swimming and surfing areas most vulnerable to pollution are those near creeks, rivers and flood control channels that carry effluent directly into the ocean.

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In Seal Beach, the nemesis is the San Gabriel River flood control channel that links storm drains all the way from the San Gabriel Valley to the 1st Street beach.

“The San Gabriel River smells just like a sewage plant. Your nose can’t make the distinction. It comes from storm drain runoff and the odor is caused by coliform bacteria.”

The Santa Ana River delivers pollutants from as far away as San Bernardino County to coastal waters between Huntington and Newport beaches.

In South County, the Trabuco and San Juan creeks stretch from the planned Foothill Transportation Corridor route near Rancho Santa Margarita and join in San Juan Capistrano, emptying out at Doheny State Beach in Dana Point.

“Surfers who are worried about pollution need to understand how damaging the toll roads are to the ocean. They are one of the biggest environmental catastrophes to hit Orange County. Our natural watershed is going to become urban sprawl,” Labedz said.

“The biggest enemy of the ocean is pavement, because it prevents water from soaking into the ground. When humans pave their neighborhoods, they build flood control channels to prevent flooding. This makes it impossible for water to soak into the ground, so everything gets washed down into the ocean.”

Everything, except what county beaches really need--more sand. Poorly designed breakwaters, sea walls and jetties increase coastal erosion, Labedz said, while at the same time, the development of hillsides prevents sand from replenishing local beaches.

“Every single, solitary beach in Southern California is artificial. None of them represents a natural beach anymore, because no sand comes down the rivers anymore,” he said. “We have no more natural rivers, so we have no more natural beaches.”

But unlike Los Angeles County, Labedz said, Orange County still has a chance to change.

“In Orange County, we can still influence how developments are designed. If a suburban development is designed so that rainwater stays on the property, then the water won’t pick up pollutants and run to the oceans.”

Even though Southern California has lost about 92% of its wetlands, Labedz finds encouragement in the fact that his group’s environmental concerns are no longer routinely dismissed.

“The damage can be reversed and that’s really the trend. There’s a whole group of scientists working on restoration ecology,” Labedz said. “Ten years ago, no one even talked about such things as watershed and runoff. Now we’re talking about restoring wetlands instead of paving them over.”

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Profile: Gordon Labedz

Age: 49

Residence: Seal Beach

Arrived in California: 1968, to attend medical school

Education: Medical degree from USC, 1972

Family: Wife, Sandy, a fourth-grade teacher in the Garden Grove Unified School District; son and daughter

When not surfing: Practices family medicine at Kaiser Permanente in East Los Angeles; associate professor of family medicine at UC Irvine

Formative waves: Began surfing at 16 near his home on Long Island, N.Y.

Organization: Founding member, in 1985, of Surfrider Foundation in Huntington Beach; now chairman of the environmental issues team for the national organization, which has 25,000 members in 29 chapters in the U.S., including Hawaii

Source: Gordon Labedz; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times