No Surprises in Seal Beach Water Quality Unlike Neighboring City

It’s no surprise that Seal Beach has some of the best water quality in the state with straight A+ grades in today’s Heal the Bay's 2011 End of Summer Beach Report Card.

Seal Beach usually ranks high in terms of water quality.The pleasant surprise comes from Seal Beach’s closest neighbor. Long Beach significantly cleaned up its act this summer, showing marked improvement this summer over last year's testing. Long Beach scored its best summer quality grades ever.

All of the monitored Long Beach sites, which suffer from upstream pollution flowing down the Los Angeles River, received A or B grades this summer. The city has implemented several pollution mitigation projects, most notably at Colorado Lagoon.

In Seal Beach, water was tested off of 1st, 8th, and 14th streets and at the pier. Water quality in all four locations merited an A+. The Summer Bay Beach Report Card survey assigns A to F letter grades to 447 beaches along the California coast, based on levels of bacterial pollution reported from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Statewide, 92 percent of beaches received A or B grades, the same as last summer.

The Beach Report Card is based on routine monitoring of beaches by local health agencies and dischargers and the analysis of water samples by Heal the Bay. The better the grade a beach receives, the lower the risk of serious gastro-intestinal and respiratory illness to anyone in the water. The high levels of bacteria in the ocean can cause flu, ear infections and major skin rashes, among other problems.

In Orange County, there were 103 coastal locations tested with the vast majority meriting water quality grades of A or B except for four perennial problem spots including:

• Newport Bay Dunes: D
• San Clemente Poche Beach: F
• Doheny Beach: two F grades  

Eighty-five percent of L.A. beaches received an A or B grade, up from 79 percent last year, due in large part, to Long Beach’s  improvements. One troubled county spot has been Catalina Island's Avalon Beach, a high-traffic summer tourist destination, which has consistently ranked among the state's 10 most polluted beaches because of leaks from a deteriorating sewer system.Though all five sites monitored at Avalon received D or F grades again this summer, Heal the Bay applauded the city for budgeting more than $5 million to make sewer repairs.

``A sustainable source of beach monitoring funding is critical to ensure that we continue to capitalize on these gains and safeguard the public health of millions of ocean users statewide,'' said Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay.

Ongoing state funding for routine water quality testing along beaches was cut in 2008 due to the budget crisis. Nearly $1 million in funding from the State Water Resources Control Board, used to help fill the gap, has now been exhausted, according to the nonprofit. Private funders have helped make the report card possible.

A new mobile application offers instant access to grades and weekly analysis of water quality for 650 Pacific Coast beaches at www.beachreportcard.org.

City News Service Contributed to this report.