State law makes it easier to close beaches

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- It could happen here.

Water quality officials say the surf in Huntington Beach last summer

wasn’t much dirtier than it had ever been.

A riddle for water watchers: then why was the beach closed or posted with

health warnings for months?

The answer is both simple and complicated.

The simple part goes like this: the beach looked the way it did because a

California law went into effect last summer that made water testing

standards stricter than they had been before.

So even though the water, for much of the summer, was no more

contaminated than usual, beach postings made things appear considerably

worse.

What’s complicated is that those same new standards, because they can

apparently be triggered by urban runoff, have the potential to make

things appear grim at other beaches as well, even though their effects

have so far been confined to Huntington.

City officials worry that it will happen in Newport Beach.

“If the Talbert Marsh [runoff] were flowing in the other direction,”

Deputy City Manager Dave Kiff said, it’s likely that Huntington’s rash of

postings and closures would flow to Newport with it.

“That’s a genuine possibility this summer,” he said.

The law that has made this possible -- for better and worse -- is state

Assembly Bill 411. When it took effect last summer in the middle of

Huntington’s beach troubles, it expanded the range of tests that were

performed at the ocean and lowered the threshold at which health warnings

were required to be posted on the beaches.

“The standards are more stringent and they require us to post signs you

never saw before,” said Monica Mazur, a spokeswoman for the Orange County

Health Care Agency.

The net effect of this legislative change was that even though Mazur said

“there really was no significant change” in the contamination levels of

Huntington waters, the beaches there were bare of bacteria-shy visitors

for months.

“We’re looking for more things and we’re finding more things,” Mazur

said. “What we see there is probably what was there before.”

Though postings and closures can have serious financial impacts on beach

cities, Kiff said the state law’s strict standard “is something that we

as a city actually support.”

But city and county officials said urban runoff -- whether it comes from

the Talbert Marsh or other sources -- seems to trigger the posting

standards of the legislation.

And because urban runoff is a problem with so many sources -- from storm

drains to leaky trash bins -- Kiff said Newport must avoid falling into

the trap of simply “throwing money” at water quality tests mandated by

the law.