Mayor tackles dirty water

Foster appoints a task force to find source of pollution in ocean, beaches.

Karen robes
presstelegram.com
07/03/2007

LONG BEACH - Mayor Bob Foster announced Tuesday the formation of a multi-agency task force that he hopes will help determine the cause of the dramatic dip in water quality at the beaches and in the bay.

Despite efforts by city staff, officials do not know yet what has caused the downturn in water quality in the past year, Foster said.

He added that a task force of city staff, academic experts and environmental groups such as Heal the Bay and the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project could lend a different perspective.

"My hope is that this task force will be able to try to locate the problem, bring back recommendations to this council on how to solve it and hopefully we can really try to nail down the water quality issues in this city," the mayor said Tuesday.

The issue came to the fore following closures of Colorado Lagoon and Mother's Beach and the city's failing marks on Heal the Bay's annual beach report card.

High bacteria counts from a leaking pumpout station - used to remove sewage from boats - prompted the city to shut down Colorado Lagoon for more than two months last year. In October, the city shuttered the south end of Mother's Beach because of sewage contamination.

Then Heal the Bay's report card in May showed Long Beach water quality in one year fell from A and B grades to Cs, Ds and Fs at nearly all of the 25 city locations monitored during the dry season.

Officials at the city's Department of Health and Human Services, which conducts weekly water tests at 25 sites, issues advisories whenever test results surpass state standards. Advisories are a way of measuring water conditions.

A five-year trend in water quality starting in 2002 showed that a high number of advisories were issued in 2006 and that most of the advisories were in the bay, said Nelson Kerr, environmental health officer.

"Every one of these except for 2006 was explained either by sewage spill or some other chemical spill that we know about," Kerr said. "In '06 in the bay, we do suspect there was a sewage spill, although we never found the smoking gun that we were looking for."

The department has spent the last several months trying to locate and fix the problem.

Efforts have included conducting dye tests at pumpout stations and restrooms to look for potential leaks and using Long Beach Fire Department scuba divers to check for leaking underwater pipes.

They also checked the Belmont Mobile Home Park near the Cerritos Channel, conducting bacterial tests and videotaping the park's sewage line and storm drains. No leaks were discovered.