It all goes down the drain

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.

Newport sweeps most residential streets once a week and cleans streets in

some business areas as many as five or six times a week, said Rick

Greaney, the beach and storm drain maintenance supervisor for the city.

In contrast to this approach, Huntington Beach sweeps its residential

streets only every other week, and most unincorporated areas are swept

only once a month, Greaney said.

DRAIN THE DRAIN

But even if garbage ends up in storm drains, there are programs in place

to try to stop it before it turns into water pollution.

The Vactor truck, along with a smaller twin that the city also uses, can

help to get muck out of the drains at an early stage in the game. In

recent years, the drains have only been cleaned about once a year, but

the addition of a second Vactor should help make cleanings more frequent,

Greaney said.

Newport Beach Deputy City Manager Dave Kiff said a new program is also

being developed to encourage filtration systems in storm drains that can

separate solid debris from water runoff. In storm drain construction

going on now near Cannery Village, these new filters and “catch basins”

are being installed.

“If it’s not a formal policy,” to require new development to use these

kinds of filters, “it’s certainly going to be an informal policy,” Kiff

said.

IN SEARCH OF DIVERSION

At least during the summer months, another method of dealing with runoff

is increasingly becoming common: diversion of the runoff from storm

drains into the sewer lines maintained by the Orange County Sanitation

District.

Huntington Beach just received permission from the sanitation district

earlier this week to conduct this sort of project, shifting some of its

runoff flow to the county’s treatment plant on the Santa Ana River.

It’s a step that may be helpful in avoiding the kind of prolonged beach

closures that plagued Huntington for months last summer. Although the

source of the contamination that forced that closure has never been

conclusively determined, urban runoff is considered the likely culprit.

The county’s willingness to allow the diversion is good news for Newport,

too, and may help it avoid the kind of closures that Huntington suffered.

“We’ve been waiting to see how the sanitation district is going to handle

this,” Kiff said.

Now that other cities have been given the go-ahead for diversion,

prospects are good that at least three Newport Beach projects can take

place.

The first, which may be completed within the next few months, will shift

runoff from the area around the duck ponds at the Newport Beach Country

Club, the Sea Island condominiums and the Hyatt Newporter into sewer

lines during the summer months, when rainfall is fairly light.

During winter, Kiff said, the diversion must stop.

“You could overwhelm the sewage treatment system” with rain-fed rivers of

runoff, he said.

THE DNA APPROACH

This summer, the city will begin a program using DNA testing to determine

the nature of the source of runoff-based pollution.

The program is intended to address a major difficulty that municipalities

face in dealing with runoff: identifying where pollution comes from.

In West Newport, for example, it has been unclear if sources of some

coliform contamination are of human or animal origin.

In January 1999, the City Council considered banning the practice of

feeding birds in Newport Harbor because of concerns that droppings from

the creatures were a major source of pollution. But no hard data was

available to determine just how much of a problem the birds were, and it

was difficult to determine if it was worth alienating bird lovers just to

eliminate the waste. As such, the proposal was shelved.

The DNA testing should help provide an answer, and that should help the

city use its resources in a way that provides the most effective

responses to these kinds of questions.

“We would spend money to solve the right problem, rather than spending

money on something else,” Kiff said.

WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

The DNA program highlights one of the biggest challenges Newport faces in

connection with runoff: incomplete information about the sources of

contamination.

Because runoff can come from miles away, city officials sometimes don’t

know what pollutants are in the water until they wash up on the beach.

Near the outfall of the Delhi Channel, which shunts flood water from

Santa Ana and Costa Mesa into Upper Newport Bay, there is a device called

the Boudreaux Boom strung across the waterway like a volleyball net.

Its purpose is to skim floating waste from the flood water, trapping it

before it reaches the bay.

After a rain, said water quality advocate Jack Skinner, the area inside

the boom looks like a snowdrift. It’s choked with a rank, sludgy blanket

of fast-food containers, Styrofoam packing, plastic bottles, tennis balls

and orange peels.

As unpleasant a sight as the waste heap may be, it actually represents a

solution to runoff pollution because the county comes and scoops up the

debris after a storm, carting it off to a landfill.

But Skinner worries about all the contaminants that don’t end up in the

boom -- all the chemicals that wash off inland streets and end up in

Newport waters.

Some of these substances -- fertilizers, chemicals from cars, and

organophosphate insecticides, such as malathion and diazinon -- have the

potential to cause real trouble for Newport Beach as the Santa Ana

Regional Water Quality Board begins to monitor more closely exactly

what’s in the bay.

And that’s why, despite all the efforts the city is exerting to deal with

the problem, still more may have to be done.

Solving the urban runoff problem, Kiff suspects, will take a

comprehensive effort -- one that will address not only the local sources

of pollution in Newport Beach, but also those sources far back in the

watershed.

“I would imagine that there’s going to be some pretty serious behavioral

changes required on everybody’s part,” he said.