ON THE WATER -- A fight to save Little Corona

Mathis Winkler

NEWPORT BEACH -- Way back when, in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

when Nancy Gardner went surfing at Little Corona Beach, things were

different.

No steps led down from Ocean Boulevard and rocks didn’t secure the

bluffs at the other end. City officials didn’t install a concrete dam

until the 1960s, and the sandy beach led deeper into the ocean. Most

importantly, there wasn’t a steady stream of fresh water into the waves.

The beach “is a poster child of what population growth has done to the

coastal area,” Gardner said on a recent morning, standing on the bluffs

overlooking the beach.

Back in the old days, Little Corona was “a very beautiful beach, with

nice surf and nice tide pools,” she said. “We only saw [fresh] water

during storms.”

When the water kept coming, it took Gardner and others a while to

catch on.

“We were naive about what the changes meant,” she said. “We’d say,

‘Oh, there’s water at the beach.’ It was a while until we realized that

was urban runoff.”

A member of the city’s harbor quality citizens advisory committee and

active in the Surfrider Foundation, Gardner has been working with others

to preserve the beach.

“We know we’ve got this water and it’s hard to go back to the

original,” she said.

One plan is to capture the water before it hits the beach, clean it

and find another use for it. Creating “bio ponds” in the canyon above the

beach could provide a habitat for wildlife and also turn that area into a

hiking spot for residents.

Another threat to the beach’s survival is the constant groups of

visitors, such as the 100-plus school kids climbing around Little

Corona’s tide pools as Gardner looked on.

“It’s one of these mixed blessings,” she said, adding that the city’s

looking into funding for guides to supervise such groups. “It’s wonderful

to see [kids coming to the beach,] but at the same time they’re all over

the rocks and the rocks can’t handle it.”

And while Gardner now reminds people that they shouldn’t take shells

or other things away from the beach, she admittedly did so herself

decades ago.

“We [took from] these tide pools,” she said. “And all in the name of

biology. For an ‘A,’ we had to get 100 specimen.”