Hansen: When it rains debris

There’s probably nothing better in Southern California than the day after a storm — unless you live at the beach.

It’s no secret that living downstream has significant disadvantages. After every storm, there is a swath of ramshackle marine debris. It’s like a broken washing machine of trash.

The brown water brims with bobbing plastic bags, bottles and assorted detritus. The beach is lined with cigarette butts, straws and thousands of pieces of Styrofoam — yes, still Styrofoam.

It’s a sewer — our sewer.

“It’s all the trash that’s upstream, if you will, in parking lots and parks that gets pushed into the storm drains and makes its way down the various watersheds,” said Chip McDermott, founder of ZeroTrash Laguna. “So if someone throws their cigarette butt or their Starbucks cup or whatever on the ground in Laguna Niguel, it ends up back down in the ocean.”

ZeroTrash holds monthly First Saturday Cleanups, so McDermott knows first-hand what rains bring down to the beach.

“It reminds me of when we have offshore winds and you see all this (pollution) hanging out over Catalina Island,” he said.

With all the recent talk of plastic bag bans, it’s easy to try and point a finger at one culprit, but that’s not how complex problems are solved. It takes many solutions from many people, starting with ourselves.

“It’s a lot more than what’s coming out at the end of the pipe; it’s everybody in the whole watershed,” said Mark Draper, board member of Miocean, a local foundation that helps fund pollution reduction projects. It recently helped with the Santa Ana River Treatment Wetlands Project, a major initiative to clean up one of Orange County’s dirtiest flood control channels.

The group wants to help with two areas of Laguna: Main Beach and Aliso Creek.

“There’s so many different initiatives out there,” Draper said. “There are people attacking water pollution from a whole lot of directions.

“Surfrider has a huge single-use plastics campaign that they do. Chip is doing a great job at picking up the trash before it hits the ocean. There are other groups that hit water conversation — sprinklers and runoff from property. And there are others that really get after the education part of it.”

Draper joked that perhaps educating children is the most important component of all.

“We may be a lost cause but hopefully the kids can figure it out and change some habits and hopefully change the quality of the water,” he said.

During every storm, perhaps there needs to be a YouTube public service video that shows little drops of trash instead of rain.

For its part, the city of Laguna Beach’s water quality department tries to keep up.

After big storms, like the devastating one around Christmas 2010, the city is at the ready with cleanup crews, but the real effort goes into prevention.

“Prior to rain, we try and keep the streets clean and the gutters as clear as possible through street sweeping,” said city employee Mike Phillips. “We require certain kinds of businesses to maintain their property in a manner where they’re not going to contribute to polluted runoff.”

Like many others in this effort, Phillips said it really comes down to personal accountability.

“Everyone should always think about what they’re doing, and ask themselves the question, ‘If it rains, is this going to go to the storm drain system to the ocean?’” he said. “Everyone contributes something to the problem, so everyone can contribute something to the solution.”

The first step is to realize there is a problem. If you have any doubt, head down to the beach after a storm and see what you find.

If only trash had our names on it, we could create a wall of shame.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at davidhansen@yahoo.com.