Holding a Line in the Sand Against Pollution

In the early morning, as he drives his Jeep through the sands of 17 miles of Orange County coastline, surfers and other regulars ask Eddie Rabago one important question: “Dude, is the water OK?”

The 77-year-old “beach sampler” for the Orange County Sanitation District cuts a striking figure as he sets out at 4 a.m. on his five-hour route from Sunset Beach to Crystal Cove. Rabago wears black rubber galoshes and carries a pole that looks like a mine detector--except for the innocuous-looking little bottle at the end, which he carefully dips into the ocean.

“I hope there’s nothing here that don’t belong,” Rabago says as he carefully retrieves the bottle and slides it into an ice chest. He writes down the water temperature and makes observations about debris, kelp and anything else on shore. He paces the beach 100 feet in both directions from where he took the sample to check for grease--a telltale sign of raw sewage.

Like beach testers elsewhere in the region, Rabago is the first line of defense against one of Southern California’s most persistent environmental problems: ocean pollution caused by urban runoff.

Last year, his work had a major impact. Just days before the Fourth of July weekend, Rabago had made his usual rounds to 17 locations, all postcard-scenic. By the holiday weekend, thanks to his samples, miles of beach were closed to bathers.

The discovery of alarmingly high bacteria levels ultimately led to the closure of Huntington Beach much of last summer, stung the local economy, tarnished the city’s reputation as prime beachfront and baffled scientists and politicians. It all began with the simple act of scooping 100 milliliters of water into a vial the size of an aspirin bottle.

The Sanitation District spends more than $2 million a year on the arduous process of monitoring the waters that millions of people love to play in.

The low-tech task of people like Rabago, a part-time worker who earns $12 an hour, is often the key to that inexorable truth about Southern California’s beaches: They aren’t all scenes from “Gidget” or “Beach Blanket Bingo.”

Within six hours of collecting samples, Rabago must deliver his little bottles to district headquarters in Fountain Valley. Rabago has never missed his deadline in 16 years of doing so-called ‘surf zone monitoring.

Once they have the samples, laboratory workers mix each with a chemical broth, put it in an incubator and watch carefully over four days to see whether harmful levels of bacteria begin to grow. If chemists find more than 10,000 total coliform bacteria per hundred milliliters, 400 fecal coliform per hundred milliliters or 104 enterococci bacteria per hundred milliliters, they know they have a problem.

Then begins the round of calls that will get signs posted, beaches closed and surfers grumbling.

“Last summer was the worst I’ve had here at the district, with what happened at Huntington Beach,” said Charles McGee, a microbiologist and laboratory supervisor for the district.

Previously, water quality agencies by law had to monitor and close beaches only if they found high levels of total coliform bacteria, McGee said. Last July, a new state law required them to test for fecal coliform and enterococci.

Although Rabago still takes the same amount of samples, the workload has tripled for laboratory technicians at the Sanitation District, where McGee said they began the additional testing before the law went into effect.

Total coliform bacteria comes from soil, animals, plants and humans; fecal coliform--which includes E.coli--and enterococci are intestinal bacteria that can enter oceans through storm drains or sewage spills. They can cause illnesses ranging from diarrhea to eye and ear infections to hepatitis.

Studies now suggest the mysteriously high bacteria levels at Huntington Beach came not from broken pipes or accidents involving the sewage district, but from urban runoff, probably from nearby contaminated Talbert Marsh, a 25-acre wetland on the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway at Brookhurst Street.

“Anything people dump into the streets that goes into storm drains goes into the ocean untreated,” McGee said.

5 Samples Taken Weekly in Summer

For most of the year, Rabago and another beach sampler gather vials of water three days a week. But between Memorial Day and late October, the pair, like similar testers in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, make five weekday trips.

In 1984, Rabago was a foreman for American Meters, a gas meter company that relocated its offices from Fullerton to Philadelphia. For a year, he was kept on the payroll, guarding a ghost of a building as the company completed its move.

A friend who worked as a beach sampler for Orange County told Rabago about the work and asked him if he’d be interested. He has been there ever since, rising at shortly after 2 a.m. in his Fullerton home and starting work just after 4.

“It’s the best therapy I could have gotten; it’s kept me moving,” said Rabago, whose agile motions and sun-weathered face belie his years.

Beach closures--whether because of bacteria or oil spills--don’t mean any less work for Rabago. In fact, as one of the few people permitted to dip anything into the contaminated water, he does more intensive testing.

On closed beaches, Rabago takes samples every thousand feet, or at every lifeguard station. He could make as many as 32 stops--almost double his usual 17.

“When I first started, I thought this was going to be a Mickey Mouse job,” Rabago said. But with the job came another responsibility: learning to use a computer. His observations are logged as a kind of abbreviated diary of beach conditions: “A lot of seaweed”; “Debris on the beach”; “Dead mammals.”

Ironically, the native of Santa Monica doesn’t like even wading. He almost drowned when he was 13, he said.

About 10 years ago, during one of his rounds, Rabago discovered the body of a missing teenager.

“Oh, I don’t like the water too much,” he said. “I don’t like what goes in it, or what comes out of it sometimes.”