The crystal-clear water lapping the shore of Avalon can be deceptive. The Santa Catalina Island resort town's water has long been tainted with sewage, its beach one of the most chronically polluted in the nation.
Now, in an effort to force the town to turn the tide on the unabated health hazard, water regulators are moving to put Avalon under their supervision and ordering the tourist hub 26 miles off the Southern California coast to quickly clean up its beach water to protect swimmers.
The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is taking the unusual step of imposing both a pollution limit on Avalon's beach water and issuing a cease and desist order. If approved next month as expected, the move would subject the small town to civil penalties if it fails to make sewer repairs, improve monitoring and meet a series of deadlines to make significant gains over the next four years.
"It will mean cleaner beaches. It will mean improved public health," said Samuel Unger, executive director of the water board. He said regulators fast-tracked the order because of the "immediacy of the problem and the long-standing nature of this problem."
Avalon's main beach, which beckons to those who stroll along the city pier and the promenade of gift shops, restaurants and hotels, routinely fails state-mandated health tests and has ranked among the dirtiest in California for most of the last decade.
Scientists years ago identified the cause of Avalon's water woes: human waste leaking from the city's century-old sewer system. The sewage seeps into the groundwater and drains into the town's enclosed bay, putting swimmers at risk of contracting serious stomach illness, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, rashes and infections.
City officials said they agree with the conditions of the order and already have contractors working on some of the required repairs. A nearly $6-million city project to clean, fix and replace sewer lines and upgrade its sewer plant broke ground last year.
"This is sewer management 101," said Charlie Wagner, Avalon's chief administrative officer. "The things that they're asking us to do are not unreasonable, and they're things that every municipality should be doing."
Last week, with tourists milling nearby, construction workers used a backhoe and shovels to dig a trench in a street near the town's breezy waterfront, pulling out a crumbling red clay sewer main and replacing it with new plastic pipe.
Avalon officials are hoping to complete the work by summer, when hundreds of thousands of visitors stream in on ferries and cruise ships.
The order, issued under the federal Clean Water Act, says Avalon must inspect, repair and replace defective sewer lines, curtail sewage spills, draft a long-term maintenance and financial plan, keep better records, test its beaches year-round and submit reports on its progress. The water board expects to vote to finalize the order April 5.
The most difficult chore, city officials said, will be a requirement that the beach not fail a single health test during dry summer months by 2016.
Clean readings would be a vast improvement. Today, Avalon Harbor fails tests so regularly that warning signs are posted on the beach much of the summer. Swimmers go in anyway.
"It's mostly the islanders that go in the water," said Abel Hernandez, 42, a taxi driver who lives and works in Avalon. "The kids get off of school and they don't have anything else to do."
Alina Calva, a college student on vacation in Avalon last week, didn't swim. The water was inviting, but no one else was swimming, so she thought something was wrong.
"The water is so clear, it's deceiving," she said.
Water quality advocates, who have asked the board to take action for years, cheered the move.
"This is a big deal," said Kirsten James, water quality director for Heal the Bay, the environmental group that last year named Avalon Harbor the second most-polluted beach in California ? the eighth consecutive year it has placed in the bottom five.
Though Avalon officials are uncertain how much the improvements will cost, the work will probably reach into the millions, an expensive burden for a town of 4,000.
Avalon Mayor Bob Kennedy, who operates a dive shop in town, said the city would find the money by dramatically raising fees, if necessary.
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