A Young Scientist Tests the Waters

Disturbed by ocean pollution and curious about how safe it was to wade into the surf near her home, Margaux Thomas set up a makeshift laboratory in the family garage last summer to test the water herself.

At the time, the Laguna Beach High School senior never imagined the impact her amateur experiments would have on her peers--and on public awareness about the environment.

Now, as the proud founder of the first high school branch of the Surfrider Foundation, she and fellow students test bacteria levels at 40 city beach sites weekly, and post the results in local shops and restaurants.

“What she has started really has legs,” said Marc Wright, chairman of the Laguna Beach chapter of Surfrider Foundation, an international environmental group.

For Thomas, who had thought since she was a girl about becoming an aerospace engineer, the crusade has become so consuming and fulfilling that she now plans to major in environmental policy when she starts college next year.

“I want to keep the water clean. I’m fascinated by it,” Thomas said from the kitchen of her family’s oceanfront home. “I feel like I really have increased public awareness. People come up to me and say it’s great what I am doing. Everyone’s very supportive.”

Thomas, 17, first became interested in water pollution shortly after her family moved from their hilltop neighborhood in Laguna Beach down to Thousand Steps beach, and she went skimboarding.

It was July 4, 2000, and a lifeguard pointed out a stake near the surf and warned her to stay on one side of it because the water on the opposite side was too dirty to swim in.

“He informed me that the right side was safe and the left side was contaminated,” Thomas recalled. “I thought, ‘How could that be? What is going on?’. . .Since then, it has always been in the back of my mind.”

Thomas started asking questions to find out how regularly the water was monitored and what bacteria levels were considered harmful.

She didn’t realize she could take the initiative herself until Chad Nelson, a local Surfrider member, gave a presentation to her biology class early this year. Nelson agreed to set her up with the equipment needed to test for the enterococcus bacteria. A UC Irvine microbiologist later approved of Thomas’ methodology.

So, from June to September Thomas worked on her own, collecting samples regularly from eight beach sites, and creating a Web site to post her results.

After a while, she decided her Web site wasn’t reaching enough people. So she stepped up her public awareness campaign by making fliers, posting them near beaches and asking shop owners to display them as well.

“I would see parents checking signs, and not letting their kids [go in the water] if they thought the levels were too high” Thomas said. “I really felt like I was making a difference.”

She began recruiting fellow students to join her, and in mid-October she moved her laboratory to the school.

Now, before classes each Wednesday, members of the school’s Surfrider club--many of them skimboarders or surfers--carry plastic bags to 40 different spots along Laguna’s 7-mile coastline to collect samples. They store the bags in a refrigerator at the lab, where they meet again at lunchtime to start the tests, which take 24 hours.

Fliers titled “How clean is the water?” are replaced each week on bulletin boards around the high school and at stores and restaurants around town. Thomas, who records the results, says that for the most part, the water has been “pretty clean.” But pollution readings spike after it rains.

“Pretty much every beach exceeds the legal level,” she said.

Knowing Pollution’s Causes, Consequences

Students get community service credit for their work. And they also gain insight about the causes and consequences of ocean pollution.

“It’s something that is literally right out their front door,” said Wright of the Surfrider Foundation. “It’s not esoteric. It’s hands-on. They’re all in the water and at the beach constantly. Most can see it from their house or from somewhere on the street. The community relies on the ocean for attracting tourism, for their own recreation. It’s really an issue of civic involvement.”

Surfrider has provided about $10,000 so far to buy the testing equipment. Members also provide technical advice and are helping the lab achieve state certification, hoping that the students’ work can someday be used as official pollution data.

The goal is to convince other school districts to follow Laguna’s lead.

“I’d love to set an example,” said Sunny Taylor, education chairwoman for Laguna’s Surfrider. “We want to raise awareness and branch out to other communities.”

Thomas’s father, a tax manager, and her mother, a manager of the Fashion Island shopping center, are proud of their daughter, but take no credit, noting that their eldest child--also a varsity soccer player--has always been energetic and goal-oriented.

“She’s incredibly hard-working and self-motivated,” said her dad, Mark Thomas. “It’s something she picked up all by herself.”