The scientific sleuth

Paul Clinton

As a boy living on a small island in southwestern Alaska, Stanley

Grant was always close to the water. He basically lived on a dock

near his parent’s shrimp processing plant.

During the summers, Grant would hop into a kayak and paddle around

the Gulf of Alaska near Kodiak Island. It was at these times that

Grant developed an affinity for the ocean, which has endured up to

the present day.

This bit of personal history provides a revealing backdrop to

Grant’s current effort, as a professor of environmental engineering

at UC Irvine, to isolate the cause of the recurring, and somewhat

enigmatic, bacterial outbreaks along the Huntington Beach and Newport

Beach shorelines.

“I’ve lived next to the ocean all my life,” said Grant, who just

celebrated his 40th birthday. “I see it as an opportunity to try to

do the community a service to find out what’s causing the bacterial

contamination.”

Grant’s easygoing manner, ability to simplify complex scientific

data for the public and his high academic profile have made him

popular among the regulators, city leaders, environmentalists and

even sanitary officials grappling with the problem.

At the moment, Grant is leading two major studies -- one that will

determine whether boats are dumping sewage into Newport Harbor and

another that looks at the role of wetlands as a possible contributor

to ocean pollution.

Playing the role of scientific private eye, Grant has also been a

central player in a handful of important studies that have offered

in-depth investigation and also questioned assumptions about ocean

water pollution.

“He doesn’t seem to be afraid to debunk some myths,” said Dave

Kiff, a Newport Beach assistant city manager. “I appreciate that he’s

not afraid to challenge those things.”

Grant has taught in UC Irvine’s Henry Samueli School of

Engineering for 11 years, but came into the spotlight shortly after a

rash of bacterial outbreaks turned Huntington Beach into a ghost town

during the summer of 1999.

After graduating from Stanford University, Grant went to work as a

seismologist. He left that field to enroll in the environmental

engineering program at Cal Tech. At UCI, he says his specialty has

been on “particle physics and particle chemistry, relative to

removing particle contaminants from water.”

Grant lives on campus with his wife Lisa, a seismologist, and two

children. When he isn’t thinking about bacterial pollution, he likes

to play the piano and cook dinner.

Early on in the search for answers about the bacteria outbreaks,

which continues to the present day, Grant nailed down funding from

the National Water Research Institute for $140,000 to look as the

sources of fecal pollution at Huntington State Beach. The institute

later renewed the grant for another $600,000.

Following the outbreaks, Grant theorized that the Orange County

Sanitation District’s outfall pipe could be the “smoking gun” that

was forcing public health officials to post and close beaches in both

Surf City and Newport Beach.

The sanitation district releases 234-million gallons of partially

treated sewage into the ocean each day. Grant was one of the first

scientists to surmise that the wastewater plume was returning to the

surf zone. He theorized that ocean currents known as internal tides

were washing the plume back to the shoreline, where it was being

sucked into the surf zone by the cooling system of the AES Huntington

Beach power plant.

But after participating in a $5.1-million district study, during

the summer of 2001, Grant began backing off that stance. Now, Grant

says he believes the heightened bacteria is probably caused by a

number of factors, including urban runoff, animal waste and possibly

the power plant.

In a separate study, Grant found that Surf City’s Talbert Marsh is

a source of fecal bacteria from bird waste, vegetation and sediment

that is washed into the surf zone with ebbing tides.

Grant has become both a sought-after expert and a popular teacher

because of his down-to-earth style and his willingness to investigate

several aspects of the problem.

“He’s an excellent communicator,” said Semsi Emsari, a former

student. “His style is very successful.”

Between July 26 and July 29, Grant and a cadre of students took

more than 400 samples of water in Newport Harbor. Grant and his

undergraduate students collected the samples at the Balboa Yacht

Basin, the city-controlled section of the marina near Balboa Island.

Two additional rounds of testing are scheduled for the $50,000

survey.

On Aug. 13, the UC Office of the President awarded a research team

led by Grant a $640,000 to study how coastal wetlands affect the

levels of fecal pollution along the Southern California coast. The

Back Bay, Newport Harbor and the Santa Ana River sloughs will be

included in the survey.

Two days later, Grant made news again, when a research team he

joined released a report suggesting that bacteria levels in

Huntington Beach are much better that thought, based on 43 years of

water-quality data.

For his work, his peers at UCI handed Grant the chairmanship of

the environmental engineering department within the engineering

school.

“This is extremely important research,” said Nicolaos Alexopoulos,

UCI’s dean of engineering. “He is the test example of an engineering

mind. We are programmed problem solvers.”