Ocean Testing Tangled in Red Tape

Nearly two years after becoming law, standardized testing for ocean pollution at California’s beaches is still not being done, blocked in part by health officials in Orange and San Diego counties who say they are not convinced the more stringent standards are necessary to protect the public’s health.

The testing program at the state’s beaches was supposed to be implemented April 1, but the dispute has held up even agreement on what those regulations should be. The delay has angered environmentalists, who pushed for the new law and are now calling on the state Department of Health Services to put the proposed regulations in place immediately.

“The beach season is almost upon us and the [expanded] monitoring is not occurring and there are no state standards,” said Mark Gold, executive director of the Santa Monica-based group Heal the Bay. “The delays are ludicrous and clearly not in the best interest of protecting public health.”

Orange County officials say proposed regulations might unduly alarm swimmers, millions of whom visit the county’s 42 miles of seashore each year.

The regulations proposed by the state Department of Health Services require counties--who before passage of the 1997 law could set their own standards for beach safety--to measure for certain organisms and for the ratio of coliform to fecal coliform bacteria.

When any one of those measures reaches a designated level, signs must be posted to warn ocean swimmers about the potential for illness, the proposed regulations say.

But some county health officials say a single test should not be enough to warn swimmers out of the ocean. They say they should not be required to post warnings unless bacteria levels are deemed excessive in two different tests on two successive days.

Without those double checks, the ocean could be labeled contaminated, for example, merely because droppings from a congregation of sea birds had found their way into the water, critics contend.

“That is not to say there is not some risk from animal waste, but we just don’t know what the risk is. We want to know more before these rules are finalized,” said Larry Honeybourne, program chief of Orange County’s Water Quality Section.

Chris Gonaver, chief of San Diego County’s Land and Water Quality Division, said: “We want to avoid having a situation of putting signs up and then taking them down all over the place, which I think would just confuse the public and not do what we are intending to do, which is protect the public health.”

“We don’t have enough information to be sure that exceeding one of these new standards alone is going to make people sick,” Gonaver added.

But a coalition of environmental groups say the delay means that those who swim in the ocean near storm drains may not be warned about exposure to bacterial pollution, which can cause colds, rashes, diarrhea, ear infections and other ailments.

Until the passage of a new state law in 1997, health officers in each coastal county decided how to test for ocean pollution, when to order swimmers out of the water and when to post signs with health cautions--typically adjacent to storm drains contaminated with human waste.

The law, written by Assemblyman Howard Wayne (D-San Diego), required counties throughout the state to use a common set of tests for organic pollution. It also delineated the levels of bacteria that require health officers to warn the public that the ocean is contaminated.

Los Angeles County health officials support the other counties, even though Los Angeles has for several years followed a rigorous sampling and beach signage program that would meet the requirements of the new regulations.

The need for improved testing became clear in 1996, when a study of Santa Monica Bay for the first time confirmed that polluted runoff from storm drains was making swimmers and surfers ill. A USC researcher found that people who swam near storm drains were almost 50% more likely to get colds, sore throats, diarrhea and other illnesses than those who swam farther away in cleaner water. Storm water is most often fouled when sewage pipes rupture.

The study also found that the vast majority of the bay’s shoreline is safe for swimming.

That research differed from routine sampling for pollution in that it measured, over many months, the health of thousands of beach-goers who swam in the ocean. The epidemiology, in turn, gave scientists clues about which bacteria most closely correlate with swimmers’ illnesses.

Before the study, public health officials had sampled mostly for “coliform” bacteria. But those bacteria, routinely present in a myriad of plants and animals, don’t necessarily signal that ocean water will make people sick.

The study confirmed for the first time what scientists had suspected: that high concentrations of other bacteria, including fecal coliforms and enterococcus, are better indicators that bathers might become ill.

Wayne, the law’s author, said $410,000 has been budgeted to pay for the cost of increased testing. He said he is “very unhappy” the state health agency has missed the deadlines for imposing the new regulations. “The failure to put regulations in place impairs the testing of the water and threatens the public health,” Wayne said.