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	Photo: Philip Kaake

    
     I’m at Krusi Park, watching my two children cavort on the play structure, talking to my friends about how we cool off when the weather gets really hot each fall. One mother takes her kids to the Harbor Bay Club to swim. Another heads to the pools at Lincoln and Franklin parks. Still another turns on the backyard sprinkler. “But what about Crown Beach?” I ask innocently. “Don’t you go there? It’s kid heaven there at low tide.” An odd silence falls over our group. “I don’t trust the water,” one mother says. “It stinks like sewage.” Another notes that her youngest child gets bad rashes when she wades at the beach. Still another says that she lets the children swim at the beach but counsels them not to get the water in their mouth.
   
    Having a 2.5-mile stretch of white sand and shallow, warm water is a major Alameda asset. Back when the beach was known as the “Coney Island of the West” (and included bathing spas, prizefights and carnival rides), it was a major tourist attraction. Today, more than 700,000 people visit the East Bay Regional Park District’s Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach each year, making it the most popular beach in the Bay Area. But the fact that the beach is part of the urbanized San Francisco Bay, combined with its location near a major mall and its tendency to create some serious, um, odors, makes a lot of residents wary of stepping foot in the water.
   
    Seaside bliss or cesspool? Since feelings run high on the topic, this reporter set out to investigate the matter—and was surprised by the results.

 

Water Pollution 101

    When you’re talking about water pollution, you have to break it down into three categories. There’s the biological stuff—i.e., the kinds of bacteria that indicate contamination by fecal matter or other wastes commonly found in sewage. Then there are industrial contaminants—the heavy metals, oils and other toxins that can be released from nearby manufacturing facilities. And finally, there’s what’s called “nonpoint source pollution,” which includes both microbiological and chemical pollutants that are washed into a body of water from streets, buildings and cars. Just how polluted any body of water is depends on how many contaminants enter it. But the geography of the coastline is important, too. “The good news,” says Anne Rockwell, park supervisor for the beach, “is that the Bay is flushed out every six hours by the tides. Plus the currents that run along Crown Beach help to carry away any pollution that’s there.”

Sewage Secrets

    The pollutants of most concern at Crown Beach are the biological ones. Generally speaking, the waters along the beach are free of bacteria during the summer months, when no rain falls. But during the winter months, bacteria counts can spike. “The majority of the time, Crown Beach is one of the jewels of the Bay Area,” says David Lewis, executive director of Save the Bay, a nonprofit organization that monitors San Francisco Bay and advocates for keeping it healthy. “But there has been a history of problems with bacteria during the rainy months.”
   
    No sewage pipes empty onto the beach; those large pipes visible at low tide are actually storm drains, through which rainwater from across the Island empties. Instead, the bacteria come from two sources. When rain falls, it accumulates into surface run-off, which can pick up pet waste and bird droppings (think Canadian geese) as it washes first into storm drains and then into the Bay. Equally worrisome, some of the older sewage pipes on the Island may be leaking. “A lot of those pipes are 50 to 100 years old,” Lewis explains, “and may only be made of terra cotta. As the soil settles or a tree root presses against the pipe, the pipes can develop cracks that create leaks during the rainy season.”

   Whether or not those bacteria make people sick is hard to say. The parks district says that there haven’t been problems with waterborne illness from bacteria at the beach in years—if not decades. But, Lewis notes, the district can’t track beachgoers who end up with tummy aches, diarrhea, skin rashes, respiratory infections or ear infections (it’s not the district’s job). Tracking is tough, because people going to the doctors (or the doctors themselves) must make the connection between being in the Bay and getting sick, and some of the symptoms are chalked up to food poisoning, a gastrointestinal bug or a respiratory virus. Additionally, many of the beachgoers themselves may not realize their symptoms have to do with their beach visit. “Are people getting sick?” Lewis asks rhetorically. “It’s pretty hard to tell if no one is tracking or reporting it.”
   
Cringing? That’s understandable. But take comfort in the fact that you can avoid this kind of bacteria relatively easily. First, don’t go swimming at the beach within 72 hours of a heavy rainfall, which is how long it takes for the bacteria to disperse. And second, know that EBRPD samples and posts the bacteria counts from the beach’s water once a week from April 1 to Oct. 31, so that beachgoers can see what’s in the water.
   
    Those postings used to be hard for lay people to decipher: columns of data about total coliform, fecal coliform and enterococcus, all of which can indicate the presence of waste matter in the water—waste water, that is, that could make you sick if you swallowed it. But in 2007 the park district started using a new sign—one that looks like a traffic light—to indicate the water’s safety level. On the new signs, posted near the restrooms up and down the beach, red means “keep out”; yellow means “warning, high bacteria levels”; and green signifies “low risk.” Notes Lewis, “If you don’t want to get sick, don’t swim when the sign is red or yellow.”
      
    Under the old system, bacterial counts weren’t posted until four or five days after the water was collected and tested, by which point a lot of people could have gotten sick. The new system, which was prompted by requests from Save the Bay, has improved the reporting turnaround as well; park district employees post the color-coded signs within 24 hours of the sampling.
 
      The beach is actually closed very rarely. The most recent closing occurred June 2006, when illegally dumped fryer fat from an Alameda Towne Centre eatery clogged a local sewer drain (this is called a “grease plug,” by the way), which led to an overflow of sewage into a storm drain that emptied on the beach.
    “We immediately closed the beach,” says Neal Fujita, natural resources manager with EBPRD, “and we kept it closed for several days.”

But What’s That Smell?

    Many people complain, of course, that the area around Park Street often smells like raw sewage. Rest assured: Cities haven’t been allowed to dump raw sewage into the Bay for more than 30 years. Instead, that rich fragrance comes both from the adjacent marshland (where natural decomposition processes naturally create a rotten-egg smell) and from seaweed decaying along the pier. “It’s a cyclical problem,” Rockwell explains. “Late every June and into July, the sea lettuces begin to wash in, and they collect right at the groin [or sea wall], which was originally built to keep sand from washing away. If the lettuce stays there too long, however, it starts to rot and smells like rotten eggs. So we rake it up and compost it right on the beach.”
  
     Periodically, another biological problem hits the beach. Starting in June 2005, doctors on the Island reported that
more than 90 patients had come in
with small, itchy rashes along their feet and ankles—a classic symptom of “swimmer’s itch,” or cercarial dermatitis. The rash is caused by the larval form of a flatworm that starts life in aquatic snails and burrows under the skin of birds and mammals to complete its lifecycle in their bloodstreams. Sometimes, for lack of a better host,  the larvae burrow under humans’ skin. The larvae can’t live there—and won’t take up residence in your bloodstream—but they can cause an itchy allergic reaction. Alas, the larvae are also most often found in shallow water along coastlines—just the kind of environment for which Crown Beach is famous.
  
     Reports of itchy ankles surfaced again in June—right after the public schools on the Island let out—prompting another wave of notices up and down the beach. The parks district is continuing to sample snails to make sure the problem doesn’t arise again, however. “Swimmer’s itch is very unusual in salt water, so the fact that it happened here had a lot of us scratching our heads,” Fujita puns. “But we’ll keep testing for it.”
    As for the itchy rash one of my friends mentioned, that’s more likely due to larval jellyfish or other tiny sea creatures than sewage or industrial pollutants, notes Sharol Nelson-Embry, supervising naturalist at Crab Cove Nature Center at the westernmost end of the beach.

Pointing to Nonpoints

    For many decades, San Francisco Bay served as a dumping ground for all manner of industrial waste that was poured directly into the region’s waters. As late as the late 1960s, parts of the Bay smelled so bad that people held their noses as they passed. Government regulations have reduced the amount of pollution that industries can emit into water by nearly 90 percent. But huge amounts of contaminants still pour into the Bay.
 
      Their source? The combined effect of tens of millions of people who drive their cars, treat their crops (and lawns) with herbicides and pesticides and throw hazardous waste into storm drains, trash bins or the Bay itself. All those chemicals get washed into the Bay every time there’s rain here—along with the dioxin, mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that remain buried in small, contaminated sites around the Bay. Moreover, it’s not just people in the immediate Bay Area that contribute to the problem; it’s humans who live along the rivers that feed into the Bay, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. As the catch basin for a watershed that covers 40 percent of California, San Francisco Bay gets a lot of stuff from a lot of people.
   
    That kind of pollution is called nonpoint source pollution, because it doesn’t come from any one place. As such, it’s hard to monitor. Researchers at the National Marine Fisheries Service, however, have estimated that the average American leaves about a quart of oil on roads and parking lot surfaces each year—which amounts to nearly 3 million gallons of oil making its way into the San Francisco Bay annually. And that’s just the oil—the amount of pesticides, herbicides, dioxin and mercury entering the Bay annually is nearly impossible to measure, but local and national environmentalists agree that nonpoint source pollution is currently by far the greatest threat to our waterways.
   
    No one monitors the industrial contaminants at Crown Beach specifically, although the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board does monitor contaminants in the Bay as a whole. But you can avoid them, again, by not swimming after heavy rains (and not eating too much seafood from the Bay). The greater concern is the effect of these pollutants on wildlife, including fish, shellfish and shorebirds. Many species of wildlife have been shown to be sensitive to these pollutants; many species also have been shown to be in decline due to them. Current campaigns to help nonpoint source run-off include educating the public on how to dispose of hazardous waste, putting stencils on sewer drains to remind people that they eventually dump into the Bay, and encouraging residents to use native plants, which require fewer chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
   
    “Unfortunately we’ve lost the natural filters that once existed in our marshlands,” Nelson-Embry says. “More than 80 percent of the wetlands that once ringed the Bay have been developed.”
 
      Still, even with the nonpoint source pollution, Crown Beach remains a good place to swim, provided you follow certain guidelines (see sidebar, “Staying Safe”). “The beach is an amazing resource here,” Nelson-Embry says. “It’s a shame so few people use it!”

Staying Safe

Crown Beach is generally safe for swimming—if you follow these guidelines.

•    Avoid swimming at the beach for 72 hours after a heavy rainfall, as surface run-off will be washing biological and industrial contaminants into the storm drains.
•    Check the posted signs near the restrooms before entering the beach area—and pay attention to what they say. The notices now contain information that pertains to the last 24-hour period. (The signs are not posted from November to March, however.)
•    Don’t swim for long periods of time in the water, as you can absorb contaminants through the skin, and try not to swallow much water, just in case there are biological contaminants that can make you sick.
•    Rinse and dry yourself off as soon as possible, on the off chance that you’ve been exposed to contaminants or parasites.
•    Take care of the Bay. There are many ways, including: properly disposing of any hazardous waste (e.g., batteries, motor oil and medications; contact Alameda County Industries, 510-483-1400, for information on where to dispose of various hazardous items); keeping waste materials out of the sewer drains; driving less and making sure your car is well-tuned, which helps reduce the amount of chemicals leaking from the engine; planting natives, which can thrive without the use of fertilizers and pesticides, in your garden; using alternative pest-control measures—ladybugs, compost and old-fashioned soap and water—for nonnatives; using water-conserving showerheads, toilets and faucets, which can reduce the risk of wastewater overflows that will eventually seep into the Bay.