Heal the Bay’s annual beach report card was just released, and surprisingly, it had some good news! The beaches are cleaner! On the down side, part of what has made our beaches cleaner according to the report, is our drought. “Drier-than-average weather helped keep most ocean waters cleaner; in rainy conditions, however, more than half of Southern California beaches tested fair to poor for traces of fecal bacteria.”
So while our ocean water seems to be improving during dry spells, water quality continues to take a major hit during storms.
From the times: “For storm water pollution, we’re not doing a good job at all,” said Mark Gold, president of the Santa Monica-based nonprofit group Heal the Bay, which compiles the report. “The beaches are just as polluted today during rainstorms as they were 15 years ago. We’ve had so much progress in so many other, different areas of coastal protection, [yet] our beaches still look like landfills after every rain.”
While stormwater issues have been gaining momentum as of late, reports such as this will continue to make it an even bigger issue in the years to come. Cities of course, have not been ignoring the issue of stormwater pollution, this report produced by Community Conservancy International which outlines best practices for addresssing stormwater pollution, and summarizes what how southern california cities have been addressing and funding stormwater issues.
Another sign that stormwater issues are rising to the top, and is increasingly getting attention from policy makers, is a recent project the County of Los Angeles just initiated a couple weeks ago. The county approved a 4.5 million dollar contract to obtain support services to enable the County Flood Control District to “consider and prepare a fee proposal and proposition 218 mail ballot measure, to be approved and paid by property owners within the County Flood Control District, for funding water quality improvements and services related to stormwater and urban runoff pollution.” If this work does eventually lead to a measure being passed, it would create billions of dollars of funding for major stormwater pollution mitigation projects. In addition to the half billion dollar prop O measure that was passed just a few years ago, maybe we can begin to really make some major advances in the stormwater pollution cleanup efforts in the coming years.
The Ecoangeleno 