Investigators Stumped by Contamination at ‘Baby Beach’

County health officials admit they are stumped.

“Baby Beach,” the small stretch of sand in a corner of Dana Point Harbor that is a popular summer spot for parents and children, has been contaminated since early August, and no one can figure out why.

During a year in which county beaches have been closed to bathers more often than any other year in recent history, Baby Beach has been the most persistent problem.

And despite an intensive investigation, officials have still not discovered where the bacteria that closed the beach is coming from, said Larry Paul, the manager of the county’s coastal facilities.

“It’s baffling,” Paul said. “We’d like to say there’s a broken sewer line or somebody is the bad guy, but we can’t find a bad guy.”

The beach, whose placid shoreline protected from waves lures thousands of young bathers every summer, was closed last Aug. 7 when county health officials on a routine check found unusually high levels of coliform bacteria in the water. The bacteria remains despite the unprecedented effort to find its source.

“It’s still a mystery,” said Monica Mazur, a county environmental health specialist. “Normally when we have a closure like this, we have an incident that is known, like a sewage spill, and the problem is fixed. Then we wait until the bacteria counts are normal and reopen the beach and move on. Not here.”

Even more puzzling is that the rest of the harbor, which is home to about 2,500 boats, “is OK, but not that stretch of sand,” Mazur said, noting that she had never seen anything like this in her 24 years with the county. Baby Beach has never been contaminated or closed before, she added.

County officials say they have tried everything to detect and solve the problem.

They have closed the nearby public bathrooms, stopped irrigating the lawns in the adjacent parks and plugged up the storm drains on the coastal bluffs to examine the runoff.

They have had the Dana Point Sanitary District send video cameras through the underground sewer lines, looking for leaks. They’ve prowled around the waters off the harborside restaurants.

“We exhausted everything we could think of that could be causing it,” said Sherman Salonen, general manager of the sanitary district. “I really don’t have anything else to offer them for suggestions.”

They’ve even checked the bilge pumps and holding tanks on the tall ship Pilgrim docked next door at the Orange County Marine Institute. But so far, no luck.

County officials say the presence in the water of coliform bacteria, which is related to fecal matter from humans or animals, is not necessarily dangerous but is an indicator that other more pathogenic organisms may also be present. As a precaution, county officials close a beach when the coliform count is high.

“In and of itself, coliform is not disease causing,” said Larry Honeybourne, the program chief of the water quality section of the Orange County Health Care Agency. “But it’s typically present when pathogens are present. If you see coliform, you might see pathogens too.”

Coliform bacteria is found in a variety of sources other than human sewage, including decaying vegetation in storm water, fertilizers, and dog and cat excrement, Mazur said. It is also found in creeks and streams and “non-sewage waters,” Honeybourne said.

“Whenever it rains, even in the most pristine part of the Sierras, for instance, you find coliform in the waters from the dirt and plants and other things. They just indicate there may be disease-causing organisms there,” Honeybourne said.

Because of the problem at Baby Beach, and to a lesser extent because of a sewage leak that closed Bolsa Chica State Beach last spring, beaches in the county have been closed for 258 days this year, a local record.

The sewage leak was discovered and repaired at Bolsa Chica after 24 days, but the Baby Beach problem is ongoing, and setting a new record with each day the beach is closed, Honeybourne said.

The only fortunate thing about the Baby Beach closure is that winter is approaching, Paul said. If this were the beginning of summer, there would be scores of disappointed people who frequent Baby Beach because of its safety, he said.

“This would be a terrible problem for us in the summer. This is a very popular beach,” Paul said.