Dirty beaches, surf can leave public at risk

Cristian Vera Aleman/Daily Forty-Niner Above, pesticides, pet feces and oily wastes are among the urban runoff that flows directly into the waters of Long Beach.

You knew that in kindergarten; you know it now.

Yet, litter is a significant problem in Long Beach, both here on campus and along the beaches for which our city is named.

The public likes to throw its trash on the ground. And students don't seem to care as they once did.
 

Cristian Vera Aleman/Daily Forty-Niner Carol Scully and her children Catherine, 7, and Jack, 2, collect trash near the Olympic Pool Plaza.

"Four or five years ago, '' said Bob Rodgers, a CSULB staff technician and an environmentalist, "we had a wide range of students getting involved in environmental issues. Now, it has become passe to be involved.''

Three psychology students sitting in front of the Nugget illustrate the problem. They're tossing their cigarette butts to the ground.

"There's no ashtray," said one of the students, declining to give his name. " If they had them, I'd have no reason to leave them on the ground."

"This school," said a companion, "makes enough money off students to have 25-cent ashtrays on the food tables."

Facilities Management, responsible for campus litter, counters that the food-court area is supposed to be smoke free.

"We waste a lot of time individually picking up cigarette butts,'' charges Richard Hernandez, manager of custodial services.

In addition to butts, soda bottles, coffee cups and food containers plague the campus, Hernandez said, and the campus spends more than 3,000 hours annually managing its litter.

Still, it is tough to keep pace at a university with more than 200 classrooms and nearly 400 labs. By day's end, many trash receptacles are overflowing and, Hernandez said, it's not economically feasible to increase the number of cleanup rounds.

"Disneyland constantly has workers keeping the grounds litter free," he said.  "It's always clean, but we just don't have the financial resources or labor force to do this."

Rodgers, who is an  audio/visual and multi-media technician, has been working closely with Facilities Management to reduce the litter problem. He volunteers to educate students about the issue, has produced a video to show to incoming freshman and is running a booth at Kaleidoscope on April 29 that will give students the opportunity to get involved in clean-up committees.

Up to 20 different environmental groups will provide information about volunteering locally with a variety of organizations at the Kaleidoscope event, and Rodgers also hopes to rekindle interest among students in environmental activism.

Rodgers is a member of the Wildlife Way Station, a volunteer group that helps preserve and protect wildlife, and of the Global Ecology Coalition, also an environmental activism group.  At one time both groups had chapters on campus.

In the past, Rodgers said, students have become involved with tree-planting campaigns following forest fires, and students were stirred to act when the Long Beach Aquarium wanted to use rain-forest wood for building.

"We had groups of students picketing the construction site of the aquarium,'' he said. "I'd hate to say it, but it takes a disaster or something really appalling to get students going now.''

Students do not need to picket to become involved, however. Simply cleaning up after yourself can go a long way toward reducing the costs of keeping the campus clean.

The Daily Forty-Niner, perhaps even the special section you are holding in your hand, often winds up being strewn around campus, Rodgers said. He wants to see recycling bins outside of classrooms specifically for newspapers.

"Bob's work really is appreciated by us," Hernandez said.

While solving the littering problem on campus is relatively straightforward, the dilemma is much more complex at our local beaches.

Despite numerous state and federal laws, including the Pollution Protection Act of 1990, that are designed to protect beaches and ocean waters, people continue to treat local beaches like a dumping ground.

El Dorado Nature Center coordinator Donna Salyer is in charge of the organized beach clean-ups and Adopt-A-Beach programs that the city of Long Beach has created to help beautify its seven miles of beaches. A dozen local businesses and organizations sponsor a quarter of a mile of coastline, and there are litter removals at least four times a year.

The junk of more than 100 communities that dumps into storm drains eventually flows into the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, both of which feed into the Long Beach harbor. The shore is often littered with all of the junk that washes up, she said.

"The large mechanical sifters that the city provides get the bigger items, so we like to focus on the smaller things that impact the environment," Salyer said.

Trash and smaller particles of gunk harm marine plant life, the land and animals in a variety of ways, she said.

A motorcycle and mattress were among the junk that recently washed up on shore.

Cigarette butts on beaches are eaten by birds, who then in turn try to feed them to their young, Salyer said.

The California Marine Institute at Terminal Island shows videos to Long Beach Unified School District students of a mother seagull regurgitating bottle caps and cigarette butts that her young subsequently eat, said Cristol Brandt, a researcher from the institute.

Cigarette butts are by far one of the largest littered items for Long Beach beaches, said Gordon Labedz of the Long Beach chapter of Surfrider Foundation.

"People toss their butts out their car windows, and when they visit beach side restaurants, they ignore the urns that are there specifically for them," he said. "It's just pure laziness."

Plastic bags, a deadly hazard to marine line, are another problem.

Sea turtles often mistake the bags floating in water for jellyfish, she said.  When they swallow the plastic, it gets lodged in their throats or their intestinal tracts, which causes them to suffocate or eventually starve to death.

Tiny pieces of plastic bags and balloon floating in the water look to fish and birds like squid, a favorite meal, Brandt said.

Dolphins and turtles ingest the pieces, which cause digestive problems that often lead to the animals' deaths, she said.

Everyday material such as bottles, especially dangerous to children who roam the beach barefoot, and fishing line are hazardous.
Salyer recalls one situation she witnessed at the nature center.

A fishing line became tangled around an egret's neck as it perched in a eucalyptus tree, she said.  The line then became tangled on the tree's branches. As the bird took off, it was yanked back and dangled from the tree.  It screeched in pain and fear for days until it starved to death.

"We tried to free the bird, '' she said. "But he was caught so high, our ladders and cherry-picker machines could not reach him."

John Hoskinson, communications coordinator of the Surfrider Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on beach preservation, said people aren't aware of the potential effects of their littering.

"People wouldn't do things like tossing a cigarette butt out a car window or over pesticide their lawns if they knew about the impact it has on our local beaches," he said.

Pesticides, oil from leaky car engines and other toxic materials people use in any neighborhood and in any city affect our local beaches, said Hoskinson.

"People think that tanker spills are what hurts the environment most, but it is actually urban runoff that is the biggest pollution problem,v he said.  "When is rains, everything like oil and fertilizer goes right into the sewer system, which takes it directly to the ocean."

Brandt and other marine biologists from the California Marine Institute test Long Beach harbor waters daily, and they often find that the water would be a health threat for swimming.

The rain from several months ago increased harmful nutrients at such a rapid rate that the waters were not safe for people to go into until recently, she said.

Bacteria that cause polio, hepatitis and e. coli have been found in the harbor of Long Beach on a regular basis, Brandt said.

"It is not surprising to most marine biologists that the water around here has not been safe for some time," she said.  "The tests we have taken daily all prove that the water exceeds the regulatory amount of bacteria in water that is considered safe."

The Heal the Bay Foundation has rated Long Beach waterways dangerous on several occasions in just the past three months. For example, the organization issued an F grade for the water tested April 1 at 36th Avenue. The water tested at Granada Avenue, just blocks from the stores and restaurants of Second Street, has received a number of F grades in the past year.

F-graded waters, both Brandt and Heal the Bay say, is dangerous enough to cause a serious disease like hepatitis. Exposing a cut on one's arm to the water is enough to receive an infection, Brandt said.

"We have the worst beach in Southern California, and it is not just our fault," Labedz said.  "There are people who contribute to the mess of contamination that is in our bay who have not set foot on our beaches.  Until we control people in their stupidity, urban runoff is going to make our beaches unfit for human enjoyment."