Huntington’s beaches earn a clean grade, UCI study says
Paul Clinton
Surf City has an image problem.
Huntington Beach’s shoreline, which has taken its lumps in the
media for a rash of bacteria outbreaks, is cleaner than it has ever
been, a UC Irvine study concludes.
“I think there’s a positive environmental message here,” said
Stanley Grant, the report’s lead author. “There’s been a lot of money
spent over the years on mitigation, and we can clearly see the
impacts of that.”
In the report, published Wednesday on the Web site of the American
Chemical Society’s journal, Grant surveyed water-quality data from
1958 to 2001. The Orange County Sanitation District and Orange County
Health Care Agency provided the data.
One of his findings in the report was that water quality improved
dramatically after the sanitation district replaced its outfall pipe
in 1971. The district releases 234 million gallons of sewage per day
from a pipe 4 1/2 miles out to sea.
Before 1971, the district released its sewage only a mile
offshore.
Grant, who chairs the school’s Department of Chemical Engineering
and Materials Science, also questioned the validity of current
water-quality testing methods.
When county health regulators warn swimmers away from Huntington
State Beach, they’re using data that’s almost 24 hours old, leaving
open the possibility that the bacteria levels have already returned
to more appropriate levels, Grant said.
The beach, Grant said, could already be clean when the sign is
poked into the sand.
“You’d have to have a stop light up on the beach flashing green
and red,” Grant said. “It flashes red, and everybody would have to
run out of the surf. It flashes green, and everybody could run back
in.”
The county’s regulators applauded the analysis as food for
thought.
Larry Honeybourne, a spokesman for the Health Care Agency’s
environmental health division, said Grant’s study presented the data
in a unique way.
The report also pointed to a series of unexplained “hot spots” for
bacteria outbreaks at the city’s state beaches.
“Huntington State Beach is an area that we have had intermittent
postings,” Honeybourne said. “It is a location that tends to have
higher bacteria counts.”
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