Surf zone testing to begin

Jenny Marder

Two Stanford professors will conduct a revolutionary study into

Huntington’s biggest unsolved mystery; the source of pollution in its

coastal waters.

Ali Boehm and Adina Paytan will arrive in Surf City on Friday with

a truckload of testing materials -- pumps, filters, coolers, portable

incubators, a global positioning system, 12 100-liter trashcans and a

weekend’s worth of personal belongings.

Their goal is to determine whether contaminated groundwater is

contributing to ocean pollution.

Scientists have yet to discover the source of pollution off

Southern California’s coast, a problem that has plagued Huntington

Beach for years, closing its beaches for most of the summer in 1999.

Many tests have been conducted and theories tested, but the problem,

and the mystery, remain.

Boehm, a marine chemist, and Paytan, an environmental engineer,

will test their theory by collecting water and sediment samples from

the ocean and testing them for radium, a naturally occurring element

that typically binds to soil in freshwater. Radium levels will serve

as an indicator of the amount of groundwater entering the ocean.

The scientists will look for a correlation between radium and

fecal indicator bacteria, which would suggest a relationship between

bacteria and the presence of groundwater, Paytan said. They will also

look to see if groundwater is being pumped into the ocean during high

tide.

Paytan teaches oceanography and chemistry at Stanford, and Boehm

teaches environmental engineering. Boehm used to surf at the river

jetties at the mouth of the Santa Ana River and became familiar with

the city’s pollution problems while in graduate school at UC Irvine.

“People have looked at bacteria pollution in many, many places ...

but this is the first time a marine chemist and an environmental

engineer are joining forces to investigate this kind of issue,”

Paytan said.

A request for $8,000 to subsidize the study was turned down by the

Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board.

With tight budget constraints in place, funding for this type of

study was not a priority, said Ken Theisen, a senior environmental

scientist with the water quality control board.

Boehm and Paytan are eyeing other sources, and if all else fails,

Boehm jokes, they’ll hold a garage sale. Until then, the two will man

the study on a volunteer basis.

Starting Saturday, the professors will be running 25 tests off

Huntington State Beach lifeguard towers nine and 10, at Magnolia

Street, every weekend until the end of August. Ten metric tons of

water will be collected over the course of the month. Most of the

samples will be collected late at night and early in the morning,

when bacteria levels are traditionally at their highest levels.

They will collect water in trash cans and then extract the radium

using a method that involves filtering the samples.

This is the first study that Theisen has seen that uses radium as

a tracer and tries to connect it to bacteria concentrations, he said.

Water regulators, however, have performed numerous groundwater

surveys, and so far, have not found any evidence to indicate bacteria

moving in groundwater, he added.

“We’ve tested all the bathrooms, looked at all the [Orange County

Sanitation District’s] lines and done thorough investigations of

Huntington Beach sewers,” Theisen said.

The most likely source of groundwater contamination would be a

leaky sewer, but with 30 feet of land between the sewers and the

groundwater table, Theisen suspects that most contaminants get

filtered out through the sand.

In late June and early July of 1999, public health officials

closed four of the eight miles of city and state beaches in Surf City

because of elevated bacteria levels. Testing showed bacteria levels

at three-times the acceptable level. The Orange County Sanitation

District spent months checking its many miles of pipeline looking for

a broken sewer line. Bacteria levels finally went down in September,

and the beaches reopened. But officials still had no answers.

In the years since, scientists have performed a slew of in-depth

investigations to isolate the cause of bacterial outbreaks along the

Huntington shoreline. Some of the sources considered have been urban

runoff, animal waste, AES Huntington Beach power plant and the

sanitation district’s outfall pipe.

A $5.1-million study meant to test a UCI researcher’s theory that

underwater waves and tides combined with the AES power plant’s ocean

water-fed cooling system might be drawing the sewage back toward

shore, did not provide answers.

Urban runoff flowing in from the Santa Ana River and the Talbert

Flood Control Channel is a major source of the pollution, but there

is still a missing piece, Theisen said.

High levels of bacteria have continued to plague Surf City

beaches.

“There is still something going on at the Huntington State Beach,”

he said. “Just two weeks ago, we had to post notices again because of

[high levels] of bacteria.”

Theisen is interested to see if Boehm and Paytan can develop a

correlation between radium and bacteria concentration.

“I’d like to rule out groundwater, or rule it in,” Boehm said.

“It’s the one piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been investigated to

death.”

The two are hoping to have conclusive results that they can

publish by the end of August or early September.

“No one has, for certain, pinpointed the absolute culprit and

groundwater is either going to be an obvious culprit, a potential

culprit or not a culprit at all,” Boehm said. “I’m just so curious,

I’m dying to know.”

* JENNY MARDER covers City Hall. She can be reached at (714)

965-7173 or by e-mail at jenny.marder@latimes.com.