Heal the Bay Blog

Oct. 14, 2014 — With the state grappling with record drought, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti today issued an executive directive to dramatically reduce the use of fresh water and the purchase of costly imported water in California’s most populous city.

Flanked by Heal the Bay policy director Kirsten James and other local environmental leaders at a press conference at DWP headquarters, Garcetti laid out ambitious targets for increasing local water supplies.

The mayor’s directive requires a reduction in fresh water use by 20% by 2017 and in the DWP’s purchase of imported water by 50% by 2024. Garcetti estimated that reducing per capita water use by 20% would save ratepayers up to $120 million annually.

“Our relationship with water must evolve. We cannot afford the water policies of the past,” Garcetti said. “We must conserve, recycle and rethink how we use our water to save money and make sure that we have enough water to keep L.A. growing.”

Through the directive, Garcetti is ordering city departments to sharply cut water use by reducing watering and replacing lawns or other water-intensive landscaping at city facilities, street medians and sidewalk parkways.  For example, city-run golf courses and car-washing operations will be moved aggressively toward 100% use of recycled water.

With the 8-million gallon water main break at UCLA still fresh in many residents’ minds, the mayor directed the DWP to report back with an enhanced leak detection and protection program to reduce loss and main breakages in the city’s aging pipe system.

The new rules sweeten city incentives to help L.A. residents cut back on their water use, including an increase in the DWP’s turf replacement incentive to $3.75 per square foot. Outdoor water use remains the major challenge for household water use, representing 50% of residential consumption.

The mayor also asked residents to:

• voluntarily reduce watering to two days a week
• to use DWP rebates to install low water landscaping and more efficient plumbing fixtures and appliances
• to ensure pools are covered to reduce water lost to evaporation

If targets are not met through the combination of mandatory city actions and voluntary resident actions, residential mandates will be implemented, including new watering, swimming pool and car washing restrictions.

In addition, the directive creates the Mayor’s Water Cabinet, which will be chaired by Deputy Mayor Doane Liu and includes the city’s first-ever Chief Sustainability Officer, Matt Petersen, and representatives from the DWP, Bureau of Sanitation, Recreation and Parks, the Metropolitan Water District and the city’s Proposition O Citizens Oversight Advisory Committee.

The Mayor’s Water Cabinet will be responsible for ensuring city departments hit targets outlined in the directive and will focus on long-term initiatives to ensure long-term sustainability of L.A.’s water supply, including:

• Increasing the local water supply through an integrated water strategy that coordinates groundwater remediation, stormwater capture and storage, green infrastructure, recycled water, and conservation
• Assessing the current tiered water rate system and identifying ways to improve it so that it optimally encourages conservation and local water use.
• Ensuring L.A. is in a leadership position on state rules and regulations related to water use.

 Heal the Bay’s policy team looks forward to working with the mayor and his Water Cabinet to achieve these aggressive goals. There are several connection points between improved local water supply and the health of the Bay.

For example, our staff continues to push for multi-use water projects that can help us capture the 10 million gallons of runoff that flow through L.A. stormdrains each day into the ocean during dry weather. Instead of dumping polluted runoff into the sea, we should be capturing, treating and reusing that water. The potential benefits are even greater during a rainstorm, which can send a 10 billion gallon torrent into the sea each day.

Please visit www.lamayor.org/drought for more conservation tips and rebate information.

                                           City golf courses are now mandated to use 85% recycled water 

Sheila McSherry, Heal the Bay’s Foundation Grants Manager, has a whale of a time looking for scat in the Pacific.

Through a friend’s invitation, I recently got the chance of a lifetime — hunting for whale excrement on the open sea! It may sound icky and a bit strange, but it’s not. It’s actually an important step in the fight to protect the gentle giants of the deep.

I joined the Center for Conservation Biology and Conservation Canines, a nonprofit organization based out of the University of Washington, on a recent orca whale research trip near the San Juan Islands.  As its name indicates, the center uses dogs to help collect whale fecal samples to determine the health status of the region’s Southern Resident Killer Whales.

As a longtime fundraiser for Heal the Bay, this outing on the water let me leave my laptop and deadlines behind and reconnect with the marine life we work so hard to protect. I also got to play scientist for the day!

On a sunny morning, I joined a crew that spent the day followed the orca whales around the islands and to the Strait of Georgia aboard the research vessel Moja. My fellow passengers included Dr. Deborah Giles,  a marine biologist who collects orca whale behavior data to assess the effects of decreased prey availability and noise pollution on the animals; wildlife biologist Elizabeth Seely; and a seafaring dog named, Tucker. I was so mesmerized by the beauty and power of the foraging and breaching orca whales, I nearly forgot we had a job to do!

Tucker, an energetic black Lab scat detection dog, was the chief detective. As Seely steadied him, Tucker leaned over the bow of the boat and communicated through movements and sounds when he sniffed a sample. Giles then maneuvered the boat so that it was easier for us to collect the samples using a clear beaker attached to the end of a long pole. These samples are sometimes as small as a lentil and can sink quickly in the open ocean. So we moved quickly to grab samples, which are tested for DNA, stress hormone levels, diet, the nutritional status of the whale, and toxins like DDT).

Conservation Canines employs rescue dogs to do its work. Tucker was found undernourished and wandering the streets of North Seattle by ShoLine Animal Shelter before becoming a scat detection dog. What makes him even more remarkable is that he is the only dog in the world trained to detect killer whale “scat” in the open ocean. His reward when he finds a sample? A rousing game of catch with his favorite WestPaw ball. 

There are three resident killer whale populations found between Washington state and Alaska. These whales are called residents because they spend about half of the year foraging in inland waters, and rely almost exclusively on salmon as prey. The Southern Resident Killer Whales are the most threatened, with a current population of 78 animals.

There are three hypotheses that have been proposed for their decline:

• Less access to the whales’ primary prey, Chinook salmon
• A disturbance from private and commercial whale watching vessels
• Exposure to high levels of toxicants (e.g. PCB, PBDE and DDT), which are stored in the whales’ fat. 

Understanding the relative impacts of these three pressures is vital to mitigating further whale losses.

Joining Conservation Canines for the day is an experience I will never forget.  And as I move in to my ninth year in environmental fundraising, I’m feeling energized by all of the promising research and advocacy to protect endangered marine life here in the Santa Monica Bay and beyond. The Pacific Ocean is connected to us all. So it’s gratifying to know Tucker is doing his part, while I do mine in an office in Santa Monica.

Communications Director Matthew King uncovers some gems amid the trash collected at today’s 25^th annual Coastal Cleanup Day.

Sept. 20, 2014 — As with my children, I love all my Coastal Cleanup Day sites equally. But I admit that one type of site holds a special place in my heart.

To promote our biggest volunteer event of the year, I’m always on the prowl for oddball stories that capture the imagination of the media and general public. And the pier sites, where teams of SCUBA divers scour the ocean bottom to remove a truly bizarre hodgepodge of lost and abandoned items, never fail to deliver.

Over the years, we have found discarded wedding gowns and WWII-era gas masks underneath the Santa Moncia Pier. We’ve had to shut down the Redondo Beach Pier site when divers plucked what that they thought was a human skull from the seabed. Tests later revealed that the object was merely a very realistic anatomical model weathered by months (years?) in the sea. After 2011’s Coastal Cleanup Day, I spent a week in vain trying to track down an Encino woman, whose wallet we had found in the waves off the Santa Monica Pier. 

And this morning was no different.

In rolling surf, a team of about a dozen divers underneath the Redondo Beach Pier recovered what looked like the sliding piece of a semi-automatic handgun. Local police came down to retrieve the gun part and begin an investigation. Who knows, maybe a criminal tossed it off the pier?

Then, as I headed back to the office, I got word that divers in Malibu Pier had also found a handgun! Cue the opening theme music from “NCIS: Los Angeles.”

One side note more germane to our mission: Before finding the weapon, the Redondo divers discovered four octopuses and at least 100 crabs trapped or entangled in fishing line and other manmade trash.

The 11,155 volunteers who participated this morning in Heal the Bay’s 25^th Coastal Cleanup Day didn’t unearth anything as dramatic as a cephalopod or a Glock. Instead, they helped collect and dispose of the everyday items that comprise the bulk of trash in our beaches and inland waterways – cigarette butts, food wrappers, bits of Styrofoam, plastic bottle caps and the like. Scattered in piles, this detritus looks like an archaeological dig, a telling testament to our throwaway culture and how we treat our natural places.

That said, a few unusual items made this year’s blotter of found objects. Among them: a horse saddle and cash register (Agoura Hills), a manhole cover (Compton Creek), a video promoting a transgender beauty queen contest (L.A. River) and a Pepsi soft-drink can from 1994 (King Harbor). 

The final trash tally reveals that volunteers removed 30,480 pounds of trash at 49 locations, spanning 42.5 miles. That haul adds to an already impressive amount of trash collected by Heal the Bay during Coastal Cleanup Day over the past 25 years – more than 1.7 million pounds. That’s equal to the weight of two fully loaded 747 passenger jets!

We can’t possibly clean up all the litter that mars L.A. County shorelines, rivers and parks in three hours on one Saturday. It is a great day of action and community, but education remains the lasting benefit from Coastal Cleanup Day. A single morning on the beach, creek or park will empower tens of thousands to take steps in their daily lives year round to protect our beaches, neighborhoods and waterways.

After years on this job, it’s clear to me that most Angelenos still have no idea how the stormdrain system works. So it’s enlightening to go to cleanup sites and watch our site captains explain how urban runoff carries pollution directly to local beaches. You can almost see behaviors changing when participants learn that a cigarette butt tossed carelessly on the street in Pacoima, or a fast-food wrapper chucked out of a parked car in Beverly Hills, will ultimately find its way to sea.

Coastal Cleanup Day always lifts my spirits. Besides being good media fodder, the massive volunteer mobilization affirms my belief that L.A. residents care deeply about our work and the local environment. A cross-section of greater L.A. rallies to protect what they love — be it sororities from Cal State Northridge, soccer teams from Lincoln Heights, small business owners from Long Beach, surfer groms from Hermosa Beach or high school students from Compton. It truly takes a village to heal a bay.

Not to worry, if you missed today’s cleanup. You can still do your part. Our Programs staff hosts monthly beach cleanups throughout the year all over L.A. County. Come join us. You might be surprised about what you find.

For a photo roundup from some of today’s cleanup sites, check out our Flickr album. More pictures to come!

                                                                   Redondo Beach police officer takes possession of handgun part found at our dive site.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Charge your cameraphones!

As we gear up for Coastal Cleanup Day this Saturday, we have some fun contests and promotions for all our wonderful volunteers. Some of these contests have prizes and some are just for fun. Some are offered by local partners through Heal The Bay, and are only available at one of our 50 cleanup sites. Others are provided by the California Coastal Commission, and are open to volunteers across the state. So, bring your friends, family, co-workers and neighbors! This is quite possibly the most fun you could have in Los Angeles this weekend.

Don’t forget to tag #HealtheBay and @HealtheBay in your Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts! You could be featured in our Best of CCD Photo Round-up next week!

Rubio’s Coastal Cleanup Day Instagram Contest

This year Rubio’s is generously sending one lucky volunteer on a luxury vacation.

• Using Instagram, snap a photo of the trash you find at Coastal Cleanup Day.
• Tag your photo with #coastalcleanupday #litterati #trashselfie #OceanLove and post it.

The winner, to be selected by the California Coastal Commission (@thecaliforniacoast), will receive a prize package from Rubio’s for an 8 day/7 night stay in a 2 bedroom Grand Suite at a Grand Mayan Luxury Resort in either Riviera Maya (Cancun), Nuevo Vallarta, Los Cabos or Acapulco! The suite can fit up to 6 people, and has a kitchen, living area and 2 private bedrooms. Dates are based on availability and there may be an extra fee for major holidays (Christmas, NYE, Presidents Week, Easter and Thanksgiving). Please click here for complete rules and details.

California Coastal Commission ‘Most Unusual Item’ Contest

Each year, the Coastal Commission gives out prizes for the Most Unusual Items collected during the Cleanup.

• Take a photo of the most unsual item you find during Coastal Cleanup Day.
• Post the photo to Facebook with the tags #coastalcleanupday #mostunusual
• OR you can email the photo to coast4u@coastal.ca.gov.

Two winners will be selected, one from the coastal areas of California and another from the inland areas of California. Each will receive a $100 Visa gift card!

Heal The Bay Cigarette Butt Challenge

Cigarette butts are the most common trash item picked up at Coastal Cleanup Day. Many people throw thier butts out of car windows and into the street where they wash down storm drains to the ocean. This jar contains the average number of cigarette butts picked up in three hours at just ONE cleanup site.

• Go to our Facebook post HERE.
• Comment with your guess about how many butts are in the jar.

Anyone who guesses correctly, as determined by Heal The Bay, will recieve a Heal The Bay t-shirt.

Party with Rusty’s Surf Ranch

Celebrate Coastal Cleanup Day with Rusty’s Surf Ranch on the Santa Monica Pier.

• Friday 9pm to close: no-cover reggae, “last chance to sign up” with 10% off food and $3.50 bud & bud light.
• Saturday during the day: 10% off food.
• Saturday night 9pm to close: “relax at the beach after your hard work” with 10% off food, $3.50 bud & bud light and no-cover reggae.

Free Tacos For Volunteers From Rubio’s

While supplies last, Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers can get a coupon for a free taco from Rubio’s! Sign up for a cleanup site in your community, and show up bright and early Saturday morning for more info.

More, More, More!

Plus, we’ve got special prizes, activities, partners and promotions planned for many individual sites. Who know’s what you might discover besides trash at your community’s cleanup site?! We’re working hard to show our Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers how much we appreciate them. Stay tuned for last minute offers, including a partnership with Perry’s Cafe.

Congratulations to our Stoked on the Coast winners!

The Grand Prize winner was selected by Heal the Bay staff and the People’s Choice winner received the most votes during the public voting portion of the contest. We hope everyone enjoyed watching — and making — these videos! Special thanks to all young filmmakers for participating.

Watch all 14 submissions on our YouTube channel here!

Grand Prize ($500 cash)

“Our Dear Friend, the Ocean” by Shyamali Moujan

People’s Choice (GoPro HERO3+ Black Edition)

“Our Dear Friend, the Ocean” by Shyamali Moujan (202 votes)

First Prize (GoPro HERO3+ Silver Edition)

“The Beach is Ours…to Enjoy and Protect!” by Ira Jacob Zimmerman

Second Prize (GoPro HERO3+ White Edition)

“Mystery Waters” by Daniel Zarate

Honorable Mention ($100 cash)

“Out to Sea” by Dayo Abels-Sullivan

A very special thank you to the California Coastal Conservancy for underwriting this contest. We are grateful for your continued support!

A shoutout to our friends at the Santa Monica Pier Corporation, who gave Heal the Bay space at the Sept. 4th Twilight Concert on the Pier. We were able to show off some of the fun marine artifacts from the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, talk about Coastal Cleanup Day – coming up Sept. 20th – and generally chat it up with the music-loving, ocean-loving community that makes the concert series such an amazing summer ritual. And a special thanks to sunglasses company Chilli Beans and O’Neill Santa Monica surf shop for donating product that evening for a fun giveaway to benefit Heal the Bay. Ross Furukawa of the Santa Monica Daily Press, we appreciate your help in coordinating the prizes too!

Grant funds make it possible for us to educate thousands of Los Angeles County-based students and their teachers about local marine life, ocean conservation and environmental stewardship. The Employees Community Fund of Boeing California deserves a big thank you for their ongoing support of one of our marine education programs, Key to the Sea. 

We’re also still reeling from the fabulous Eco-Casino Party benefit at The Bungalow, hosted by Fox TV and Ford. Celebrities from Fox’s Fall TV lineup spun a giant prize wheel for their charity of choice, netting Heal the Bay over $4,000. Fox and Ford, thanks for letting us rub shoulders with the stars!

After many years of campaigning, and a successful enactment of a similar ban in LA County, we are proud to announce that a bill to ban single-use plastic bags in California, SB270, has passed the state legislature. Our announcement of this victory sparked an intense debate and a lot of questions on our Facebook page. Based on this tremendous feedback, we’ve identified the top misconceptions about the bill in an attempt to provide some clarity.

1. This ban will just result in people using more paper bags, which means cutting down trees that are needed to make oxygen.

The bill includes a minimum 10-cent charge for recycled paper bags, which has proven effective at motivating people to bring their own reusable bags to the store. Still, the goal of the ban is not to convert people to using recycled paper, which comes with its own set of environmental issues. Instead, the goal is to get people to use thicker, reusable bags and be aware of how their shopping habits generate trash. The current thin plastic bags are often mistaken for food by marine animals. Ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic pollution has harmed over 663 species of marine life. Plus, did you know that ocean ecosystems produce 70% of the world’s oxygen?

2. This ban takes away people’s freedom of choice.

Balancing the concerns of a lot of different people with different values isn’t easy. Right now people who choose not to use plastic bags still have to pay for them via additional costs built into the total cost of goods. The ban does not force people to bring bags to the store. If you’d like, you can still choose to buy a bag at the store.  This bill transfers the cost of bags to the people who choose to use them, and ensures that people are not forced to pay for bags they do not want or use.

3. It would have been better to pass legislation that requires stores to hand out biodegradable plastic bags.

Biodegradable plastic is a bit of a misnomer. These materials require very specific conditions to biodegrade (like high heat and certain kinds of bacteria), which the ocean does not provide. Though biodegradable bags can be effective in certain circumstances, they are not helpful in reducing ocean pollution.

4.The bill is a scam so that stores can make more money by charging people for something that used to be free.

Yes, this bill means that stores will start charging for paper bags, but it isn’t so they can make more money. The charge for these paper bags and reusable bags covers the cost of providing more durable and environmentally friendly bags, which are more expensive to produce. When the store is expected to provide bags for free they often opt for thin, plastic bags, because they are the cheapest option. Still, these bags aren’t really “free,” the cost is passed on to consumer via increased costs of goods, whether or not they use the bags.

5. Most plastic bags get reused or recycled.

Less than 5% of plastic bags are recycled in California. That is a tiny faction of the 13 billion plastic bags distributed in California each year. Reusing these bags is certainly better than throwing them “away”, however eventually many of these bags end up in landfills, littering our communities, or worse, the ocean. The current plastic bags are so light that they easily can drift away from trashcans and recycle bins. If you reuse these bags to handle messes like pet waste, please keep reading for some alternative suggestions.

6. This ban unfairly targets poor people, and kills jobs.

This bill actually provides economic benefits to California communities, and allows flexibility for low-income shoppers. The charge for recycled paper bags will be waived for people who use EBT cards to buy their groceries. Additionally, the bill includes $2 million in funds to help businesses that make plastic bags transition to producing reusable bags. The bill will encourage California businesses to create more sustainable, green jobs rather than perpetuating polluting practices of the past.

7. Plastic bags make the world a more sanitary place.

Plastic bags are actually a fairly new invention, and have only been around since the 1960s. Before that people lived without plastic packaging, often using less packaging or reusable packaging. Reusable bags can be wiped down or tossed in the wash with other household textiles, like towels.

8. People need these bags to dispose of pet waste and line trashcans.

If you’ve relied on these bags to pick up pet waste or line small trashcans, please consider some alternatives. First, try reusing the many other plastic bags that can be found around your home, like bread or produce bags. Even better: use a pooper-scooper to pick up dog waste. Or if you have a cat, you can combine cleaning the cat litter box with taking out your kitchen garbage, so that you don’t use an additional bag. Do your smaller trashcans really need their own liner? You may be able to combine that trash into a larger bag when it’s time to take it out.

9. This is feel-good legislation that doesn’t accomplish anything, and distracts from more important issues.

Local bag bans already cover about 1/3 of Californians. Places that have already implemented such measures have already seen a reduction of plastic bag waste in their communities. The Los Angeles County bag ordinance, which became fully effective in 2012, has resulted in a 94% reduction in disposable bag usage (including 100% reduction of plastic bags and a 25% reduction in paper bags).Plastic is a major pollutant that negatively affects people and ecosystems, which is an important issue. Though this bill does not solve the plastic waste issue, it is an important step towards raising awareness of sustainable alternatives and sparking a healthy debate about how our throwaway culture negatively impacts our economy and environment.

Image: John Pritchett / Hawaii Reporter

You’ve probably heard about the succession of tropical storms and hurricanes pummeling the West Coast recently. Hurricane Lowell’s heavy surf resulted in Malibu lifeguards making over 250 rescues — on Aug. 24-25 alone. Hot on its heels this week is Hurricane Marie, which might be delivering the biggest waves to hit Southern California since 1997. With 25-foot swells at The Wedge, you can bet the lineup is pretty deep with big wave surfers.

Whether you’re an X Games hopeful, boogieboarder or sunbather, Heal the Bay encourages all oceangoers to exercise extreme caution at the beach this week. While the following tips especially apply this week, the advice is useful year-round.

How to stay safe in the ocean: 

1. Know your limits. It is totally okay to stay on shore and enjoy the beauty of the waves from the beach. But keep an eye on rogue waves that seem to come out of nowhere — especially during stormy weather.
2. Talk to a lifeguard about current conditions. They’re aware of hazards and site-specific conditions.
3. Don’t just jump into the water. Always take 15 minutes on shore, watching the pattern and intensity of the breaking waves. How many waves are in a set and at what frequency are they rolling in? The idea is to time your entry into the surf as best as possible to avoid being hammered by an incoming set.
4. Never swim alone. Always swim with at least one buddy and at a beach with a lifeguard.
5. Look for the best place to enter and leave the water. Plan your exit route in advance. If things get hairy, you don’t want to find yourself trapped in the impact zone or washed against dangerous rocks without a plan. It’s always easier getting in than getting out.
6. Mind your surf etiquette. Bigger waves mean bigger forces. A surfboard can become a lethal weapon if surfers cross paths in the water.
7. If you see someone in distress, don’t hesitate: Carefully assess the situation. Don’t compromise your own safety to help — a bad situation could easily get worse, fast. Notify a lifeguard immediately, or call 911.

If you’re in the water and in trouble:

1. If you’re caught in a rip current, don’t fight it and swim parallel to shore until you are free from the rip. Then you can swim into shore (rip currents are in isolated locations between sand bars). 
2. If you are caught in the waves, it’s easiest to dive under them than try to swim through them or jump over them. By diving under, you actually use the natural power and rolling pattern of the wave to help you get past the white water.

Click here for more details on surfing and swimming safety. 

Photo: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times