Contamination Keeps Beaches Closed on a Gorgeous Day After the Rains

At the shore, dawn broke Wednesday with uncommon brilliance.

The sky was a dreamy blue, the sun a pastel pink, the air fresh and clean.

The waves were big and bold too. But at many usually popular beaches, there was nary a swimmer or surfer in sight.

From the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the Ventura County line, Los Angeles County’s famous beaches were closed Wednesday. The culprit: a series of huge sewage spills. The verdict: This was not rad, dude.

“It’s so disappointing,” Nick Christensen, 36, a longtime surfer, said after checking out conditions at El Porto, a surfing spot in Manhattan Beach. “But it’s part of living in L.A.

“We get the dynamics of the most exciting city in the world, the synergy it creates. And we get the backlash of what goes along with it, and that’s people and sewage problems.”

The sewage problems are directly attributable to El Nino. The storms that have socked Southern California in recent weeks have overwhelmed sewage lines. The sewage has to go somewhere--and that somewhere, regrettably for surfers and county health officials who wish it wasn’t so, is the ocean.

What’s particularly disappointing for surfers and bureaucrats is that despite a widespread belief that water quality in Santa Monica Bay is poor, the county’s sewage spill problems have for the most part been under control in recent years.

Last year, the county Department of Health Services ordered only four sewage-related beach closures. In 1996, there were also four. There were five in 1995 and two in 1994.

Already this year there have been 10--nine in February.

The past few winters, the spills have involved comparatively small amounts of sewage, discharges measured in the thousands of gallons. This months’s have been measured in the millions.

Before this winter, the last big “whopper,” as Jack Petralia, the department’s director of environmental protection put it, came in January 1993--when, because of heavy rains, 21.8 million gallons of sewage spilled into Ballona Creek, near Marina del Rey, and then into the ocean.

This month’s troubles began Feb. 3, when floods burst a 30-inch-diameter sewer main in Ventura County. About 63 million gallons of sewage from the Hill Canyon Waste Water Treatment Plant, which treats 90% of the waste for Thousand Oaks, flowed into the ocean. Health officials closed 30 miles of beach in Ventura and Los Angeles counties for days.

A few days later, heavy rain caused 243,000 gallons of sewage to splash into Ballona Creek en route to the ocean. Beginning Feb. 14, beaches from Venice Boulevard south to Imperial Highway were closed for six days, according to the health department.

The most recent storm provided the capper.

Two million gallons of sewage flushed into Ballona Creek on Monday and 5.5 million more on Tuesday, the health department said. Meanwhile, the rain undermined many private septic systems along the Malibu shoreline.

Along with the sewage, the rain washed all manner of other gunk into the bay. Water quality samples Tuesday up and down the county’s beaches were decidedly poor, Petralia said.

“We can’t tell in a lot of places whether the high [bacteria] counts are just rain related or whether there’s sewage in it,” he said.

“When this thing happened, we started looking at the map and said: ‘Let’s be conservative and close the whole thing.’ ”

Technically speaking, the beaches are still open. Anyone can still saunter or sprawl on the sand.

For that matter, the ocean is still open, too. The health department’s “closure” amounts to what lifeguards called a “strong advisement” not to get wet.

Lifeguards noted that there will always be a few mavericks who insist on surfing and swimming--even in high levels of fecal coliform bacteria.

“If they insist on going in the water, we are not going to stop them, unless we are ordered to do so by a police agency,” county lifeguard Robert Moore, the operations lieutenant at the Hermosa Beach station, said Wednesday.

“I have to go in if somebody needs to be saved,” Moore said. “Otherwise, believe me, I don’t choose to go in.”

It remains unclear when health department officials will lift the closure. Given a few sunny days, like those forecast for the rest of the week, the powerful ocean surge will wash things clean, officials said.

Even the hardiest maverick, however, had to think twice before storming into the ocean Wednesday. In Santa Monica, lifeguard Lt. Jon Moryl took a look at the sea and said: “The ocean here is obviously brown. It doesn’t look right.”