Zeroing in on waste

Paul Clinton

A massive testing effort now underway is expected to give local

water-quality regulators an in-depth reading on the pollution in

Huntington Harbour and Anaheim Bay.

While the effort hit a snag last month when needed rain never

materialized, the study should be complete by the end of the year,

officials said.

The broad study began in August when members of Orange County

CoastKeeper, an environmental group based in Newport Beach, began

collecting samples of water and sediment in the harbor and bay.

Group volunteers have been busy filling plastic laboratory bottles and

scooping up sediment on the harbor bottom as part of the study.

Group leaders had hoped to gather “wet” data after a rain storm, but

rain never came. That phase of the testing has now been put off until

November.

Once the testing is completed, all the data will be handed over to the

Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, the public agency charged

with cleaning up the harbor.

“They’ve never had their own data before,” said Garry Brown,

CoastKeeper’s executive director. “This is a long-term project to get the

dry and the wet season sampling.”

Once water regulators compile and analyze the testing results, they

will begin to determine how high a priority to make the harbor in their

cleanup plans.

In the past month, board staff members have been zeroing in on

Huntington Harbour and Anaheim Bay, which is located on the western

boundary of the docks and is a receptacle for polluted harbor water.

On April 3, the State Water Resources Control Board released its

recommendations for which waterways should be on a federal watch list.

And at this point, the board suggested holding off on listing the bay

and harbor, which are hot spots for metals and pesticides in the sediment

and pathogens in the water.

Other pollutants in the bay and harbor could be added to the list,

known as the Impaired Water Bodies 303d List. In their recommendations,

state regulators asked for more data about the bay and harbor, which have

not been adequately studied, Brown said.

Once a body of water is added to the list, state and local officials

must develop standards for how much pollution can flow in the water. The

standards are known as “total maximum daily loads.”

City officials welcomed the study. They have struggled to pinpoint the

source of pollution and bacteria that has forced a nearly continuous

string of beach closures and postings since the late 1990s.

“We need to have better testing to show us what are the specific

pollutants in that harbor that need to be addressed,” said the city’s

environmental engineer Geraldine Lucas. “It’s hard to attack a problem

when you don’t know what the sources are.”

Three channels starting back in Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove

and other cities drain into the harbor. The water and sediment they bring

usually contains urban runoff, which has pesticides from lawns, copper

from brake pads and other harmful substances.

The Bolsa Chica Channel begins at Bolsa Chica and Rancho roads. It

receives runoff from the Anaheim Barber City Channel.

The East Garden Grove Wintersburg Channel and Sunset Channel also

bring waste water from inland Orange County cities to the harbor.

In August, CoastKeeper volunteers gathered dozens of water and

sediment samples from 30 testing stations around the bay and harbor.

The group used a metal scooper known as a Van Veen grab to collect

sections of sediment from the harbor floor. Groups of worms and other

critters were extracted from the mud, frozen and tested for their

“toxicity,” Brown said.

The regional water board is paying for the study, which has been

budgeted at $379,000.

Pavlova Vitale, the board’s environmental scientist overseeing the

work, said the historic study would bring new and groundbreaking

information about the harbor’s problems.

The board has already included the harbor in its “basin plan,” a

blueprint for cleaning up the area’s waterways.

“The goal of the study is to compare the ‘wet’ season and the ‘dry’

season,” Vitale said. “We also want to compare the harbor with other bays

and harbors.”