There are always some interesting gems that turn up on the sand after heavy rain.

If you’re missing your bowling ball or sofa cushion, you should have checked the shoreline in Huntington Beach. Oh, and if you were saving your 2-foot-tall plastic Easter Bunny for this year, that was also picked up.

Those were just some of the items about 75 volunteers from Orange County Coastkeeper and Sam’s Club picked up last week during a beach clean-up held from the Santa Ana River to Talbert Street.

“The magnitude of it is incredible. It’s really important for people to visually go and see it,” said Briana Madden, education coordinator for Orange County Coastkeeper. “If you live inland, it’s hard for you to understand your connection to the coast.”

The group was taken down to the Santa Ana River, to see all the nastiness that flows from all the inland communities. The heavy rain pushes out all the stuff that has been sitting in the Santa Ana River for months, and spits it out right on the sand.

“I took them out to the river to see this gray, brown water just gushing out,” she said.

In all, the group picked up 25 bags of trash, the most common items included Styrofoam, water bottles, bottle caps, cigarette butts, balloons, food wrappers and straws.

The winter season – especially after long periods of dry weather – always end up thrashing our normally pristine beaches, and it’s been especially bad the past few weeks. I cruised down to take a quick peek at the water in Newport on Monday, and while the city crews do a good job of picking it all up as quick as possible, the normally blue water had turned a splotchy, dirty rust color.

Not pretty.

I chatted with Rick Greaney, the city’s operations superintendant for the General Services Department, who said the rainy season so far has produced about 7.5 inches of rain.

Here’s a fun little fact to impress your friends with: since early January, the city has hauled off about 600 tons of debris from the beaches, mostly bamboo, logs and weeds from the natural vegetation grows in the river that gets flushed out after it pours.

And if the stuff that comes down the Santa Ana River isn’t enough, the strong winds and surf about a week and a half ago also broke loose a tons - literally tons-  of kelp from Corona del Mar and the Newport Pier areas, creating a pretty nasty scene.

What amazes me is that there are still the determined surfers out there brave enough to paddle out in all the mess. I especially stay out of the water every time I get an e-mail from the folks over at the Orange County Health Agency warning of a rain advisory, asking people to stay out of the water for at least three days to wait for all the bacteria to clear.

Larry Honeybourne, one of the scientists over at the Orange County Health Agency, said the worst places to surf or swim after it rains are near the San Gabriel River in Seal Beach, next to the Santa Ana River, and at Doheny near the San Juan Creek.

Those areas get especially grimy because storm drains dump from inland directly into the ocean.

“That’s why we like to say ‘the ocean begins at everyone’s front door’,” Honeybourne said. “So if you took motor oil and put it in the gutter … it goes into the water totally untreated.”

Honeybourne said there haven’t been any scientific studies that have shown whether sickness occurs more frequently after a storm, but he does know that the levels of bacteria tend to exceed state standards after heavy rainfall, and it’s best to just stay out for a while.

For more info on OC beaches, go to ocregister.com/beaches.

- Laylan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Beach culture, Environment, Surfing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.