Grand jury: Find better water-quality tests

The Orange County Health Care Agency should find faster and more accurate ways to test water quality to keep beachgoers safe, the Orange County Grand Jury said in a report Friday.

To water-quality experts, that sounds like a great idea, but there’s little they can do until new testing methods are developed and approved — and that’s not likely to happen in the near future.

The report pointed out that beach closures are generally dictated by water tests, but because it takes 24 hours to get test results they may be obsolete by the time a closure is posted. It also mentioned that because the current test methods look for three types of bacteria that may indicate something harmful in the water, unnecessary beach closures can occur.

County health care agency workers look for “indicator bacteria” — fecal coliform, total coliform and enterococcus — because state law requires it, agency environmental health specialist Monica Mazur said.

“The higher the indicator, the more likely it is that you will find something that is going to cause illness in humans in the water,” she said.

A common cause of pollution, and the appearance of indicator bacteria, is sewage spills. But the bacteria can appear when there’s no contamination, and that’s what concerns the grand jury.

Mazur said the indicator bacteria can regrow on its own in beach sand, seaweed and thin layers of slime called biofilms. That calls into question what water quality workers are looking for.

The other problem with the current tests is how long they take.

“We use a method that requires the bacteria to grow in culture,” said Charles McGee, lab supervisor for microbiology and chemistry at the Orange County Sanitation District. “No one can tell you what the water quality is today until tomorrow. We’re always a step behind.”

Researchers are working on new, faster types of testing. A February study by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, which McGee worked on, concluded that two new test methods are promising but not yet ready for widespread use.

Then there’s the hurdle of regulatory agencies. State and federal agencies dictate what kind of tests can be used when it comes to public health.

“People have seen the Environmental Protection Agency take five to 10 years to approve a new method of testing, so even if we discovered one right now, we’d still have to be doing what we’re doing for a long time,” Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff said.

Even as the Grand Jury report urged better water testing, it praised the county’s overall water quality and local efforts to improve it. It also suggested county agencies should create a plan to deal with aging sewer lines to prevent spills, and they should consider building treatment facilities at creeks with high bacteria levels.

Water quality in Orange County has gotten better over the last few years, Mazur said, and it’s probably because there’s been a lot of attention given to the issue and a lot of money spent on it.