Improved water testing program ready to go

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- A seawater testing program that had been criticized

for providing ambiguous data has been modified to address that problem,

city officials say, and could begin in less than two weeks.

The program is a state-funded, $175,000 effort designed to pinpoint

the sources of pollution that flow into the ocean with urban runoff.

It had initially focused on trying to match strains of E. coli

bacteria collected from local waters against samples of such bacteria

from humans, animals and other sources in order to figure out where the

contamination came from.

But in late May, officials from the city and other agencies expressed

concern that the design of the test would not provide definitive results.

The company that was proposing to conduct the study could not quantify

its data -- determining exactly how much bacteria came from which sources

-- to a degree that would provide useful results.

“The bottom line,” said Deputy City Manager Dave Kiff, “is that the

amount of specific bacteria from a sample is just so random that there’s

no statistical significance to it.”

In place of that program, the agencies involved in the study have come

up with something new: an approach that combines a search for

human-specific viruses with a “source-tracking” program to find possible

contamination sites on land.

“This approach has more credibility in the scientific community,” said

local water quality advocate Jack Skinner, who has been sitting on the

board working on the testing program.

Skinner said the new method is far from perfect: at present it can

only indicate whether a virus is present or not and it can’t determine

whether the virus is alive or dead.

“But the fact that [human-specific viruses] are present, if you find

them, is very helpful because it then indicates that one needs to make a

careful sanitary survey upstream looking for the source of the

contamination,” he said.

The cost of the new method is the same as what would have been spent

on the first approach, but the money will be divided differently. Only

half of the $175,000 available will go to testing, while the other half

will be devoted to studying possible upstream problems.

Kiff said the testing schedule is not yet confirmed, but the program

is likely to start around July 17 if everything goes as expected.