Surf City overshadowed
Eron Ben-Yehuda
The recent waves of misfortune lapping onto Surf City’s shore threaten to
drown its reputation as a beach paradise.
“It’s giving Huntington Beach kind of a bad name,” said Traci Adams,
manager House of Flys, a Downtown sunglass store. “I wouldn’t come here
if I was a tourist.”
The city’s drive to attract visitors from out of town began in the early
1980s and slowly picked up steam with the Pierside Pavilion opening in
1989 and Pier Plaza, often characterized as the gem in the city’s
redevelopment crown, unveiled last year.
Future plans call for hotels to be built by the Waterfront Hilton and
along the 500 block Pacific Coast Highway, but they depend on the growing
attraction of a town now seemingly plagued by chronic ocean pollution.
To make the problem even pricklier, hypodermic needles washed ashore last
week.
The city’s director of community services, Ron Hagan, says he’s concerned
about the impact these events will have on the city’s economy.
“The longer these problems continue, the more long term damage its going
to do,’ he said.
The solution to the city’s ills will come in finding the sources of beach
contamination, he said. But that’s easier said than done as officials
continue to struggle in their efforts to pinpoint the problem.
Finding those responsible for discarding about a thousand hypodermic
needles will prove difficult because they had no identifying marks such
as serial numbers, said Monica Mazur, an environmental health specialist
for the Orange County Health Agency. And she doesn’t expect the culprits
to come forward and confess their wrongdoing, she said.
“I don’t think anyone is going to give them a prize for it,” she said.
Certainly not surfer Mark Pauperas, 33, of Huntington Beach, who planned
to dive in the water just south of the pier Sept. 16 when he noticed a
few of the two-inch needles that had drifted onto the wet sand. The
syringes were capped with a blue plastic top, but the other end was
missing leaving a sharp point exposed, Mazur said.
“I almost stepped on one,” Pauperas said.
Health officials closed about two miles of beach, from Newland Street to
10th Street north of the pier, until the following day when no more
needles were discovered, Mazur said. They’re the kind used to inject
anesthetic at dental offices, she said.
While bacteria readings off most of the Huntington Beach shoreline stayed
within state health standards, the origin of the contamination remains a
mystery, she said. Officials have come to the realization that the
problem may be due to different sources at different times.
“Ultimately, we might not be in a position to unequivocally say, ‘This
was the cause,’ ” she said.
That doesn’t bode well for the city’s future, but Adams counts on short
memories to pull Huntington Beach through.
“By next summer, people will already forget,” she said. “They’ll probably
forget next month. Hopefully.”
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