Rainfall runoff warning issued for 72 hours, complied with by four people and one dog

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – Public health officials issued a routine post-rainfall water quality advisory this week recommending that the public avoid ocean contact for seventy-two hours, a recommendation that was observed by four people, one of whom was a lifeguard on duty and one of whom was a dog acting on unrelated instincts.

The remaining beachgoers entered the water within ninety minutes of the rain stopping, several of them while reading the advisory on their phones.

The Seventy-Two Hour Rule and Its Enemies

The guidance is not controversial among scientists. Urban runoff carries bacteria, motor oil, animal waste, fertiliser and assorted street matter directly into the surf zone through storm drains, and concentrations spike sharply after rain. Water quality monitoring and beach report cards are published by organisations including the Surfrider Foundation and Heal the Bay, both of which have been saying the same thing patiently for decades.

The guidance is also not controversial among surfers, who agree with it completely, cite it accurately to others, and then go surfing.

Everybody knows, said Rosalind Achterberg, who has surfed Venice for eleven years and who was in the water on Monday. I could give the presentation. I could give it well. And then it was three foot and clean and offshore for the first time in five weeks and I made a decision.

The Decision Matrix Nobody Admits To

Behavioural researchers have mapped the reasoning, which follows a consistent internal structure.

Step one: acknowledge the advisory is correct. Step two: assess wave quality. Step three: if wave quality exceeds a personal threshold, immediately generate a mitigating belief. Step four: enter water. Step five: keep mouth closed, which is described by participants as the safety protocol and which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

The mitigating beliefs are remarkably standardised across the region. The most common are: it only rained a little, the tide is going out, this beach is fine it is the one down there that is bad, and I have been surfing here for years and my immune system is basically a different species now.

Dr Yusuf Alameddine of the Coastal Behaviour Group described the last belief as the most interesting. There is no evidence for surf-acquired immunity, he said. There is however substantial evidence that people who surf after rain get sick, tell everybody they got sick, correctly identify why they got sick, and do it again in November.

The Symptoms Have Nicknames

The regional culture around post-rain illness is well developed enough to have vocabulary.

Ear infections are the standard. Stomach complaints are common enough to have a name in every beach community from Ventura to San Diego, most of which are unprintable and all of which involve the name of a local storm drain.

One Malibu surfer described a three day episode in February that he referred to only as the Topanga Situation, and declined to elaborate beyond saying that it was worth it and that the wave in question was overhead.

Observations Filed at the Shoreline

• The first good swell after a storm always arrives inside the advisory window. This is not a coincidence; it is the same weather system.
• Nobody has ever left the water because of an advisory. Several people have left the water because it went flat.
• The advisory sign is usually posted at the top of the stairs, which means it is read by people who have already carried a board down the stairs, which is past the point of no return.
• Surfers will complain bitterly about water quality at council meetings and then swim in it forty hours later.
• Every regular knows exactly which storm drain is worst and precisely how far away from it to sit, information that is passed down orally and is more accurate than most published data.

The Genuine Public Health Problem

The uncomfortable truth beneath the joke is that the advisory exists because Los Angeles built a drainage system whose entire design purpose is to move dirty water off the streets and into the sea as fast as possible, and then built a recreational culture on top of the place the water arrives.

Telling surfers not to surf is the cheapest available intervention. It costs a sign. Fixing the runoff costs several billion dollars and a considerable amount of political attention, and so the sign remains the policy.

In that light, the seventy-two hour rule is less a health guideline and more a receipt. It is the city noting, in writing, that it knows.

Documentation of institutions solving problems by labelling them is a continuing project at Bohiney Magazine, and the British approach, which involves discharging into rivers and then producing a strongly worded report about it, is examined in the London Prat environmental coverage.

The advisory expires Thursday. The swell is forecast for Wednesday.

The Storm Drain Has Better Name Recognition Than the Mayor

Regional surveys have repeatedly found that surfers in coastal Los Angeles can name more storm drains than city council members, and can locate them more precisely on a map.

This is not civic apathy. It is a rational allocation of attention. The council member affects a surfer’s life through a multi-year policy process with uncertain outcomes. The storm drain affects a surfer’s life on Tuesday, directly, through the ear.

Alameddine’s group found that ninety-one percent of regular surfers could identify their nearest outfall by sight, sixty-eight percent knew roughly how far its plume travels on an outgoing tide, and eleven percent had opinions about its maintenance schedule that turned out, on checking, to be correct.

More along these lines at Waterford Whispers News.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/