Ocean Monitors Call for New Safety Tools

It’s a tough job, trying to keep the public safe from ocean water contaminated with human waste. Even though Southern California counties test the water regularly and put out daily alerts about which beaches are unsafe, the tests themselves are imperfect and outdated by the time word gets out.

But scientists locally and nationwide are developing better, faster and cheaper monitoring methods. In fact, the question of how best to test the water is such a hot topic that 200 experts from around the nation will gather this week in Irvine to discuss it. Massachusetts researchers are experimenting with caffeine as a universal sewage warning indicator in a coffee- and cola-happy culture. A University of Michigan professor is trying to develop a test with a half-hour turnaround time. UC Irvine scientists are experimenting with a variety of viruses and other indicators.

The meeting could hardly take place in a more appropriate location. The water-quality testing that occurs in coastal Southern California equals all of the monitoring in the rest of the nation combined.

“California has one of the most forward-looking programs in water quality of any of the states,” said Al Dufour, a senior research microbiologist at the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Cincinnati. Dufour has studied this issue since the 1970s. “They try to get news to the public about water quality as rapidly as possible and they’re continuing to find better ways to research health effects.”

Coastal counties started testing in earnest nearly three years ago, when new state regulations went into effect. The rules require county health officials to warn the public when bacteria levels exceed thresholds. The impetus for the 1997 bill came in 1996, when a Santa Monica Bay study found for the first time that polluted runoff from storm drains was making swimmers and surfers sick.

But health officials don’t actually look for viruses and other disease-causing organisms, because that would require tests that are both costly and cumbersome. Instead they test for bacteria that indicate the presence of sewage. These so-called indicator bacteria are found in human intestines, but also in other warm-blooded mammals and birds, meaning that their presence does not always mean human waste is present.

At times, those bacteria cannot be detected even when the water is contaminated. At such times, tests would falsely indicate that the water is safe. But the biggest shortcoming of current tests is the 24-hour lag time between testing and results, not to mention the time to get the samples to labs and to post warnings.

Swimmers could unknowingly enter tainted waters, or beaches could be needlessly posted with warning signs, hurting coastal communities’ economies.

“It could be almost two full beach days before any health warning signs are posted. That to me is the biggest concern,” said Mark Gold, executive director of the environmental group Heal the Bay, based in Santa Monica.

Dave Kiff, assistant city manager of Newport Beach, agreed. “People swim in the water when it’s dirty and don’t swim when it’s clean. That’s my biggest frustration with indicator bacteria. All that said, it’s the best [test] we have so far.”

Earlier this month, the state awarded the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, a group funded by the EPA and the region’s sanitation agencies, a $1.5-million contract to develop a rapid indicator test. Stephen B. Weisberg, executive director of the Westminster-based agency, hopes researchers can use methods developed for other industries to create such a test for coastal waters.

“We’re trying to build onto what has been developed for other types of bacteria in other fields--the hospital industry, the drinking water industry, food service. They all work on rapid indicators,” Weisberg said. “We’re hoping to glom on to those.”

Researchers agree it would be unwieldy and prohibitively expensive to test for every human bacterium and virus in the water. “It’s better to use a broad-brush approach and look for indicators rather than specific pathogens,” said Charles McGee, a microbiologist with the Orange County Sanitation District, which monitors the beach at 20 spots near its plant.

The perfect indicator would be one present wherever there are disease-causing organisms. It would be unable to grow in the water, so scientists could get an accurate count. It would not die out easily. Laboratory workers would find it easy to measure. It would be found only in sewage.

The list of requirements goes on. And no one indicator does it all.

Eventually, the state picked three bacteria--total coliform, fecal coliform and enterococcus--as the indicators.

But scientists acknowledge that these three are imperfect. Bacteria die off quickly, making the water seem safe, while many types of viruses survive for weeks in cool ocean water.

Recent research by UC Irvine professor Sunny Jiang showed that ocean water that tests negative for bacteria still sometimes harbors viruses. Jiang is evaluating other indicators, including human viruses.

Jiang is among the speakers scheduled to appear at the Tuesday meeting, which is sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the State Water Resources Control Board, the National Water Research Foundation and the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project.

“Coastal water is a big thing to me,” she said. “A lot of people in California really care about coastal water. It’s a hot topic, research wise. There are a lot of interesting questions to be answered and interesting research to do as well.”

Other researchers are looking to solve another common problem: It’s impossible to know whether the indicator bacteria come from human or animal waste. Although the link between human sewage and illness is clear, there has been little study of whether animal waste makes people sick. Animal waste often reaches the ocean via urban runoff--the fertilizer, pet droppings and other contaminants that wash off streets and lawns and into storm drains that flow into the ocean.

The inability to differentiate between human and animal sources, coupled with the 24-hour lag time for results, makes tracking the source of pollution more difficult.

Weisberg said, “We want to be able to warn the people when a [sewage] spill event occurs, and we want to track it upstream--we want to know where it came from. Twenty-four hours later, the source is gone.”

Had such technology existed during the Huntington Beach shoreline closures in the summer of 1999, researchers would likely have had more success in finding its origin.

Genetic research involving DNA and RNA may one day allow for easy and fast identification of the source of bacteria, whether it is human sewage, a dog park, birds in a marsh or dairy cows in Chino.

“I think there’s a little bit of frustration on my part that we could indeed be closing the beach because of bird droppings--something that is in the environment anyway,” said Kiff, the Newport Beach administrator. “I would love to be able to address a beach closure, and know the source of contamination and be able to go right back and stop the contamination right now.”