A major study from UC Irvine came out last week underscoring everyone's
fears of spending too much time in the ocean -- for every 2.5 hr/wk you
spend in the ocean you increase your changes of catching something by
10 percent. Which is very ugly news for surfers.
This is from an editorial in the LA Times this week in response to the
Irvine study.
Runoff is a regional problem, yet dozens of cities — almost all of them
far from the ocean, wouldn't you guess — have thrown up blockades to
avoid meaningful action. The water board that covers parts of Orange
and Riverside counties required cities to review their general plans to
see if they'd adequately considered water quality. The requirement
raised an outcry from almost every city that the water board was
interfering with land-use authority.
The mayor of one inland city complains that his city is almost fully
developed, and reviewing the general plan would do no good. But the
city of Newport Beach is also nearly built out, yet it finds plenty
that can be done. Fixes can be as simple as a grassy swath to absorb
runoff water before it hits a drain.
Newport Beach is taking several other steps that many other cities have
declared impossible. Its code-enforcement officers issue citations to
residents who, for example, hose off their filthy driveways and let the
oil and garbage run into storm drains. Its enforcement of the
pooper-scooper law has led to howls from equestrians who felt they
should be exempt. The city sends remote cameras through storm drains to
find companies illegally dumping waste.
So serious is Newport Beach about runoff that it handed out 250 of the
257 citations for runoff pollution in Orange County during the last
year.
The San Diego water board is crafting rules requiring homeowners to
wash cars in nonpolluting ways. Those could involve using biodegradable
soaps or keeping water from running into the street by washing on a
lawn that absorbs the water. The complainers have some legitimate
gripes. The state's water boards laid down ambitious rules without
fully working out the costs. A coalition of about half of L.A. County's
cities won a judge's ruling in January that the state had imposed a
trash cleanup law without doing the required economic studies. And if
municipal budgets were ever tighter, it's hard to remember when —
though cities also were dragging their heels a few years ago when they
were flush.