Alex Coolman
It's a yellow monster, a quarter-million-dollar vehicle equipped with a
cylindrical waste tank that can hold 10 cubic yards of muck and debris.
It carries 1,500 gallons of water in the shiny metal water reservoirs
that are mounted like missiles on its sides.
It's Newport Beach's newest Vactor truck, a behemoth of a machine that
will be introduced to the public today during Clean Harbor Day
celebrations at the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum.
The truck is used to vacuum the 2,200 storm drains that lead from city
streets to the harbor and the ocean -- and that are often a source of
water pollution.
But besides serving a practical function, the Vactor is also intended to
be a symbol of the city's commitment to addressing what is currently its
most pressing water quality problem: urban runoff.
And if a massive yellow truck sucking sludge out of storm drains will be
hard to miss on city streets, it's still only one of the ways the city is
trying to make talk about "clean harbors" translate into water that's
actually free of contaminants.
It is, to say the least, a difficult challenge. Urban runoff is a complex
phenomenon with many different sources.
When a gardener on Westcliff Drive sprays insecticide on his rose bushes,
he contributes to the problem. When a fast-food customer in Santa Ana
throws a Styrofoam cup in the gutter, that contributes something, too.
The watershed for Newport Beach -- the area from which runoff drains into
the bay and harbor -- is massive, extending far inland to parts of
Irvine, Lake Forest and Santa Ana.
Every little piece of garbage, every glob of animal waste, every drop of
motor oil that falls onto the streets in these areas eventually washes
downstream if it doesn't get picked up first.
And though this sort of runoff doesn't always smell or look as dramatic
as a raw sewage spill, it can have serious effects on the health of water
users.
A 1996 epidemiological study of swimmers in Santa Monica Bay showed a
strong correlation between swimming near runoff outfalls and health
problems, such as sore throats, headaches, fevers and respiratory
ailments.
Newport Beach is trying to make sure that the thousands of people each
year who flock to the waterfront do not meet these kinds of fates.
SWEEP IT UP
One of the simplest ways of dealing with runoff-based pollution is
surprisingly terrestrial in nature: the city maintains an aggressive
street-sweeping program to remove debris from the pavement before it has
a chance to wash down into the water.
