Testing the waters

Alex Coolman

It doesn’t look like a place that should have anything to do with

water in Newport Beach.

The Orange County Health Care Agency’s water quality laboratory is

hidden at the back of a dusty parking lot in Santa Ana. It’s surrounded

by facilities that are dedicated not to ocean issues, but to testing for

sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis and other health threats.

But the lab plays a crucial role in the county’s efforts to ensure the

safety of the waters off Newport Beach. And as emphasis is increasingly

placed on addressing urban runoff and finding the sources of beach

contamination, the lab is at the forefront of local research.

On a recent afternoon at the facility, lab director Douglas Moore

picked up a tray of water samples and flicked the switch of a black light

mounted on a counter.

Some of the water samples on Moore’s tray were clear; others were

yellow. When he placed the tray under the light, however, things looked

different: some of the yellow samples began to glow with a blue

florescence.

Those, Moore said, were samples that contained fecal coliform

bacteria, the organisms that are the lab’s primary quarry.

When enough cells of a water sample from a Newport beach turn blue

under the light, the Orange County Health Care Agency either posts the

beach with safety warnings, or may close it altogether.

Since the summer 1999 passage of an Assembly bill that created

stricter testing standards, the lab has had to do more testing than ever

before.

“Instead of just testing for one bacteria, we are now testing for

three,” said Monica Mazur, a spokeswoman for the health care agency. The

lab now searches not only for total coliform counts, which was the

indicator used before the bill passed, but also for fecal coliform counts

and the presence of enterococcus bacteria, which causes blood infections.

The pressure of legally mandated testing is just one of the forces

driving the lab to increase its efforts, Moore said. He and his workers

are also seeing an increased workload because of efforts to deal with

urban runoff.

“Besides the normal work, we’re participating in the Newport Beach

study” to determine if human viruses are found in area waters, Moore

said. The study, which in August reported the presence of some viruses in

the Santa Ana-Delhi Channel, is a project of several local agencies,

including Newport Beach.

What the lab has been contributing, Moore said, is research that

should help to determine the statistical correlation between the presence

of bacteria and the presence of human viruses -- which actually make

swimmers sick.

That correlation is a fundamental assumption of the county’s approach

to ocean water testing, but it’s not fleshed out in as much detail as

health-care officials would like. If the connection can be pinned down,

Moore said, it will help the county assess health risks for ocean

swimmers in a way that is both precise and relatively inexpensive.

“[Coliform] is a great indicator,” Moore said, eyeing the pattern of

colored water samples. “It’s just a matter of finding it accurately and

finding it fast.”