Testing the waters

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT BEACH - She didn’t want to believe that the waters she swam in

were polluted. The beaches would, after all, be closed if they were

polluted, Miranda Young thought.

So for her sixth-grade science project for the Pegasus School in

Huntington Beach, 12-year-old Miranda set out to prove her hypothesis --

that the beaches in Newport Beach are not polluted.

But when the Newport Beach resident tested the water in four different

spots, she found that one popular area was in fact contaminated.

“[Tests] told me that Little Corona was polluted and I tested the

water right here where it runs into the ocean and the tide pools,”

Miranda said as she crouched down by water running into the tidal area.

“So it could be killing the creatures or animals in the tide pools.”

In order to conduct her science project Miranda needed to be able to

test the water for pollution.

She and her mother, Jody, contacted the Surfrider Foundation and the

Idex laboratories, which makes water testing kits.

She used the kits to test the waters from one end of Newport to the

other, staring with the Santa Ana River Jetty, then the Newport Pier, The

Wedge and finally at Little Corona.

“I tested each site four times,” she said. “The first day it had just

rained and I took a sample of all four. The Santa Ana River Jetty was

polluted and Little Corona was polluted -- all the others were clean.”

When Miranda did her second, third and fourth tests, the River Jetty,

the pier and The Wedge tested clean of the water bacteria, coliform, and

all four sites tested clean of E-coli.

But each time when she added colisure powder to the water samples

taken from Little Corona, to test for coliform, it turned red, indicating

contamination.

“I wouldn’t want to swim here,” the young scientist said.

Miranda determined that the problem at Little Corona was urban runoff,

which trickles down to the beach.

Surface runoff is essentially the water that cascades from homes and

streets into tide pools, beachfronts and harbors. It contains anything

from animal waste, to spilled oil and fuel from cars, to litter from the

streets.

“It’s really sad that this is supposed to be the big marine center and

they have this going right into it,” said Jody Young, Miranda’s mother,

who also grew up in Newport Beach.

While Miranda’s findings disproved her hypothesis, the pollution at

Little Corona is not news to everyone.

Nancy Gardener, a member of the city’s harbor quality citizens

advisory committee who is active in the Newport Beach chapter of the

Surfrider Foundation, has been working with others to preserve the beach.

“If she had a big budget and could have tested for other things, she

might have found nitrates or heavy metals from brakes on cars,” Gardner

said. “What she found was an indication of a problem -- a problem we know

about. It must have been interesting to find firsthand.”

There are two possible solutions being considered right now, Gardner

said.

The first is a mobile filtration system that the city is testing,

which would suck the surface water up and pump it back as cleansed

drinking water.

The second option, since reclaimed water tends to be such a

controversial issue, she said, was the creation of ponds in the canyon

above Little Corona that would catch and naturally clean the runoff by

way of plant life.