Beach Pollution Source Still Elusive

After spending $5 million on an elaborate study, the Orange County Sanitation District said Wednesday it is no closer to pinpointing what caused the summer-long closure of the Huntington Beach coastline in 1999.

The study, conducted by consultants hired by the district, found no substantial evidence that an offshore sewage plume caused the beach pollution. But for the first time the district said it could not rule the plume out as one of the possible causes.

The study measured thousands of water samples to test a UC Irvine professor’s theory that bacteria-laced waste water pumped four miles out to sea was finding its way back to shore.

“We have not yet found a connection between coastal ocean processes and bacterial contamination on the beaches,” said Marlene Noble, one of the scientists who conducted the study.

Lisa Murphy, a spokeswoman for the district, added: “They are not ruling it out ... [but] the scientists cannot link the treated waste water to the shoreline contamination.”

Officials said it’s possible that the beach closure could have been caused by several factors coming together at one time, including polluted runoff, leaking restroom sewers that have since been fixed, old sewers at a mobile home park and waste from seagulls.

“The contamination problem ... is complex and made up of multiple sources that contribute to the problem,” said Kelly Christensen, principal environmental specialist for the district.

For environmentalists, the agency’s disclosure left many questions unanswered. A written report won’t be ready until October, and the data collected by scientists weren’t immediately available.

“We’re always looking for good science, and once this has been read and digested, we’ll see how good the science is,” said Christopher Evans, U.S. executive director of Surfrider Foundation, which has monitored the Huntington Beach closures. “The thing that looms over this is that it’s an Orange County Sanitation District study. Everyone sees the potential conflict there.”

Stanley Grant, the UC Irvine scientist who first suggested a link between the sewage discharge and the beach pollution, said Wednesday he didn’t doubt the district’s findings. But he said its carefully worded conclusion leaves open the possibility that his hypothesis is still valid.

“They’re saying they cannot put the plume in the surf zone but can’t rule it out,” Grant said.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School under guidance by the U.S. Geological Survey and sanitation district scientists. Scientists from UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute and the University of Hawaii reviewed the results and presented their findings at a meeting of the district’s board of directors Wednesday.

The results leave the mystery as to what caused the high bacteria counts that forced health officials to close miles of Huntington Beach in 1999 during the height of tourist season. Every summer since, bacteria counts have spiked. A portion of the beach was closed again for a month this spring.

“That is the million-dollar question that I don’t think anybody in this county knows the answer to,” Murphy said.

Sanitation district officials hope their study will allow the agency to keep a waiver to the federal Clean Water Act.

The waiver, which is up for renewal next year, allows the agency to treat half of the waste water it pumps into the ocean at levels less than those adopted by most of the nation’s 16,000 sanitation districts.

Environmental groups and three coastal cities, including Huntington Beach, oppose extending the waiver.

Sanitation district officials say treating all of its outflow to the highest levels--by using microorganisms to eliminate bacteria and viruses--would cost more than $400 million.

Also at stake is Huntington Beach’s economic lifeblood. The city’s 8.5 miles of beach attracts 10 million people a year. The recent closures due to pollution have sullied Surf City’s reputation.

After 1999’s beach shutdown, authorities looked at and discarded possible causes for the high bacteria levels, including urban runoff from Talbert Marsh and the Santa Ana River.

In late 2000, UC Irvine’s Grant suggested the sanitation district’s offshore plume was partially to blame.

He theorized that partially treated sewage from showers, sinks and toilets was being drawn back to the beach by tides, underwater waves and the local AES power plant’s ocean-fed cooling system.

“A really important question is whether this study tests the exact hypothesis,” Surfrider’s Evans said.

“How exacting was the testing of this hypothesis? And how will the results be spun out by a bunch of flack catchers for the guys who want to keep doing the polluting?”

Grant and other scientists agreed that finding the cause of the pollution has proved vexing. Researchers have gone down several paths but have yet to come up with a definitive cause.

Murphy said the agency’s study involved 150 researchers and volunteers and was “the single largest sampling event to occur in this area.”