Environment: A new county report shows unsafe pollution at most every tested site.

August 1, 2001

By SUSAN GILL VARDON
The Orange County Register

	Swimmers frolic at the outflow of Aliso Creek, where the water is often posted as unsafe for human contact due to urban runoff. It wasn't on this day. Photos: Chas Metivier / The Register

Urban runoff from seven south Orange County cities is so noxious that it exceeds safe-swimming water standards at all but three of 35 sites - and by 100-fold at four - a county report released Tuesday shows.

The report discloses the results of 10 weeks of testing for fecal coliform bacteria at 35 pipes that drain runoff from city streets and from about 60 other sites in Aliso Creek.

These results are just the tip of the iceberg. To meet tougher clean-water standards, residents could face tough new environmental restrictions - such as a ban on washing cars in driveways and limits on the amount of water used to irrigate lawns.

And cities will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars - dollars not now in any city's budget -- to meet testing, treatment and monitoring requirements proposed by the regional water board in its new storm- water permit.

County biologists started testing the creek after a March 2 order by the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board that the county and the seven cities -- Aliso Viejo, Laguna Beach, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Woods, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo -- make the creek safe for swimming.

	Fed a diet of urban runoff, Munger Creek in Lake Forest has shown in tests it helps fatten the fecal-coliform count along Aliso Creek.

Their next step is to use the information to find ways to clean up specific sites, to locate the source of the polluted runoff and step up public education.

"We could spend millions of dollars putting filters at the ends of pipes and not necessarily solve the problem in the creek,'' said Dennis Wilberg, Mission Viejo's director of public works.

"The science doesn't seem to be there to say, 'This is what you install.' It's not a simple solution.''