Alex Coolman
Drier weather in recent years has not prevented increases in the
number of Orange County beach closures, according to a report released
Thursday by the National Resources Defense Council and Defend the Bay.
The report, "Testing the Waters 2000," is a nationwide report on the
condition of American oceans, bays and lakes, detailing the levels of
closures in recent years and the probable causes for those events.
Most remarkable for Orange County, said Alex Helperin, project
attorney with the council, was the contrast between 1998, when El Nino
weather patterns brought heavy rains, and 1999, which was unusually dry.
Despite the difference in rainfall, the report concluded, county beach
closures actually increased.
"What the numbers say to us is that this problem is not going away,
and we need to do something about that," Helperin said.
At least two factors probably contributed to the study's results,
Helperin said.
One has to do with the behavior of urban runoff, which is suspected as
the cause of 73% of county beach closures.
Though runoff may be carried to the ocean by rainfall, Helperin said
the report's numbers suggest that even minimal precipitation can muck up
the coast as effectively as a more massive deluge.
"It doesn't take too much rain to wash the stuff down," Helperin said.
"We may be seeing that you get the same sorts of effect (with slight
rains)."
Also clearly a factor affecting the report's numbers for California is
Assembly Bill 411, which put into place stricter standards for posting
and closing beaches starting in the summer of 1999.
The bill, county health care officials have said, is making
once-acceptable levels of contamination show up as problem areas.
But Bob Caustin, founding director of the Newport Beach environmental
organization Defend the Bay, said that is no reason to dismiss the report
as a statistical aberration.
"The more we look, the more problems we see," he said. "The question
is, what are we going to do about it?"
Coming to grips with the issue raised by the study will be
challenging, Caustin said.
"When you're trying to track down a source for, say, the Rhine
Channel, that's one thing," he said. "But there's 154 square miles of
watershed that have to be worked with."
