The Beach Is Open--For Now

In vintage whodunit fashion, myriad suspects have been examined and accusations leveled to find a cause for mysteriously high bacteria levels that contaminated Huntington Beach shores a year ago today, heralding a summer of gloom for the tourist mecca.

Possible culprits: leaking human waste from a nearby treatment plant; sewage lines disturbed by the razing of an old trailer park; droppings from flocks of birds that visit a nearby wetland; ground water being disturbed by construction of a new hotel.

And as the city prepared for an onslaught of tens of thousands of beach goers this Fourth of July weekend, environmentalists, city officials and water testers alike were anxiously eyeing tidal conditions, which are the same as last July 1--extremely high and low tides, which scientists believe are linked to high bacteria levels at the beach.

“It’s disheartening, but I’m not surprised,” said Christopher J. Evans, executive director of the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation. “We’re going to see it for some time to come. These problems took a long period of time . . . to create and they’re not going to be fixed overnight.”

Costly and time-consuming studies since last July have ruled out many sources. Experts now are zeroing in on the most likely, yet most difficult source to pin down: urban runoff, probably from the Talbert Marsh and the Santa Ana River. But even now, water-quality experts don’t know for certain what caused the repeated episodes of bacterial pollution that tainted several miles of prime beachfront.

The stakes are high. Huntington Beach’s 8.5-mile shoreline attracts 10 million visitors annually. Already, warning signs are posted along stretches of Huntington Harbor and Huntington State Beach warning of water unsafe for human contact.

The city, the county and the Orange County Sanitation District have spent about $5 million on a slew of studies. Results of three major investigations were to have been released already, but ongoing data analysis and peer review by independent scientists have led to a delay, Huntington Beach city spokesman Rich Barnard said. Reports now are expected by the end of the month.

The three public bodies have taken preemptive action to funnel storm-drain runoff to sewage-treatment plants. Still, the record number of Orange County beaches periodically closed to swimmers continues to mount. The county has a hotline--(714) 667-3752--to keep beach goers apprised of the latest closures along its 42-mile coast.

And one year after the first closure, the lack of answers and plethora of questions remain striking.

No Easy Answers in Tracking Pollution

Health officials were eyeing rising bacteria levels in late spring 1999. The first reading that led to a closure turned up last year on June 29. A water sample taken that day contained extremely high bacteria levels. Health officials went on immediate alert, suspecting that raw human sewage was hitting the beach. Two days later, a mile stretch of Huntington State Beach was closed.

“When it first happened, everyone felt fairly confident we would find the source quickly, repair it and make the problem go way,” said Shirley S. Dettloff, a Huntington Beach councilwoman and a California Coastal Commissioner. “As we went from closure to closure, quite frankly, it was devastating. We saw the impact economically on those who have businesses along the shore.”

By Aug. 25, more than four miles of ocean from Goldenwest Street to the Santa Ana River mouth was off-limits because of the persistent contamination.

Officials at first looked for a sewage leak, a tactical mistake later criticized by a panel of experts for wasting valuable time.

The sanitation district drilled hundreds of holes, inspected miles of pipeline and put red dye into their outfall system as part of a $1.4-million strategy.

“It was a very frustrating experience as the summer progressed,” said Michelle Tuchman, former spokeswoman for the Orange County Sanitation District. “With every new effort, the hope of finding the exact source was very high. Every time, the test results came back negative. Our hopes were dashed. . . . It was . . . an emotional roller coaster.”

Charles McGee, laboratory supervisor for microbiology at the sanitation district, said they had to pursue sewage first because it posed the greatest health threat.

“Every place we looked . . . was a dead end, so I lost a lot of sleep over it,” he said.

Although the testing ruled out leaking sewage as the cause of the chronic pollution, McGee said he still believes the cause of the first incredibly high reading on June 29 could be tied to sewage.

“June 29 is one day when something happened that can’t be explained. I think there was sewage on the beach that day,” he said. “Obviously we have no clue--I don’t know if we can ever know what happened on the 29th.”

Construction work on a new hotel next to the Waterfront Hilton also was considered a possible source because the project involved drawing a million gallons of water out of the ground per day, filtering it and pumping it into a channel that flows into the ocean.

However, McGee said officials ruled out this potential source because the timing of the project and testing of that water showed it wasn’t contaminated. That water then was diverted to a treatment plant because officials were concerned it might add sediment to the Talbert Marsh. Scientists later determined that the amount of water the project had sent to Talbert Marsh was insignificant when compared with the overall amount of water from natural tidal flushing.

Focus eventually shifted to an old trailer park, where sewage pipes might have been damaged during the park’s razing. Workers hydropunched around the park’s perimeter, McGee said, an investigative technique to sample the underground water for evidence of contamination traveling outside the sewer line.

But nothing was found, he said.

By September, bacteria levels were waning. Politicians, including Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R- Huntington Beach) urged local health officials to open the beach. Despite pressure, health officials kept beaches closed out of concern for the public, drawing kudos from environmental activists.

“There’s always the concern of local politicians--let’s get the beach open as fast as was we can,” said Monica Mazur, spokeswoman for the county Health Care Agency. “We want to protect the public health first and foremost, but we also don’t want to keep things closed unnecessarily.”

Runoff, Tides Linked in UC Irvine Study

The first major break came in January, when researchers from UC Irvine released the results of a $150,000 study that pointed to Talbert Marsh, in combination with urban runoff and ocean tides, as a key contributor to last summer’s pollution.

The 25-acre wetland lies on the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway near Brookhurst Street. It captures runoff from a 12-square-mile basin of Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley. It also attracts thousands of migratory birds a year, whose excrement and the runoff may have been flushed out into the ocean.

Though this was the first study to point to a source, the marsh is not considered the only culprit. In the early part of last summer, when bacteria levels were escalating offshore, naturally occurring sand bars had built up in the marsh and were holding back most of its tainted water.

By this spring, the three public bodies developed a multi-pronged action plan, which sparked a slew of studies:

* A $514,000 study of sediment and ground water near the beach, the marsh and inland Huntington Beach.

* A $785,000 exploration of water, waves and current actions to determine how bacteria is transported once it enters the ocean. (Included is a $90,000 USC study that involved dumping magenta dye, oranges and grapefruits at the mouths of the Santa Ana River and Talbert Marsh to see where the currents took them.)

Initial observations from the dye study showed that water from Talbert Marsh appeared to congregate in near-shore areas that were bacterial hot spots last summer. But officials have declined to release results of any of these studies yet, saying they need to be properly analyzed, peer-reviewed and integrated to provide proper context.

“As long as the work is in progress . . . the worst thing to do would be to give you a half-baked loaf of bread,” Barnard said.

Once those studies are completed, he said, the city plans to use $4 million it received from a statewide water bond that voters approved in March.

Another aspect of the mystery was the timing of bacterial spikes last summer. While many corresponded with tidal cycles, others remain unexplained, McGee said.

Officials are especially concerned about this weekend because tidal cycles are virtually the same as that fateful weekend last year--extremely high and extremely low tides, caused by the pull of the sun and the moon.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” said Larry Honeybourne, program chief of the county Health Care Agency’s water quality section.

Bacteria levels began escalating again this spring. Since late April, Huntington State Beach near Magnolia Street has been regularly posted. (On Friday, the shore 150 feet north and south of Magnolia remained closed. Other closures affected Peters Landing in Huntington Harbour, portions of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach near Treasure Island and parts of Dana Point.)

In May, the city, county and sanitation district announced that from early June through Labor Day, 2.5 million gallons of urban runoff would be diverted daily from Talbert Marsh and the Santa Ana River mouth to a treatment plant, where it would be cleansed and piped five miles out to sea. The county is contributing $276,000 for the plan, while the city is spending about $630,000 on diversions.

While the flow from pump stations and gravity drains has been rerouted, a key tool is not in place. The public entities have yet to get permits from federal and state authorities to erect sandbag berms at the mouth of the river and the marsh during especially high tide.

While local activists applaud the diversion, they say it is not a permanent solution.

“What they’re doing has value in the summer, but it is a Band-Aid in terms of the big picture,” said Evans of Surfrider. “What we have to do is change our behavior. The answer lies in the education of all of us. We all play a part in the complex system of watershed abuse that leads to urban-runoff problems.”

He is hopeful, however, about the public attention focused now on urban runoff and the lessons learned about handling such a large-scale disaster as last summer’s closure of Huntington Beach’s coast.

“There’s no question about it--Huntington Beach is a harbinger of the way things could be in the future on the West Coast of the United States,” he said.

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Times staff writer David Reyes contributed to this report.