There’s poop in the water, and soon it’ll taste like ash!

This story in the Downtown Gazette shows that water quality in Alamitos Bay has fallen below “disgusting” to somewhere near “ithinkimgonnabesick.” Water’s a challenge in the best of times: an agreement between Long Beach, LA County and water officials ended Sept. 30, allowing the county to pump highly concentrated urban runoff into the bay. Bleccccch. (Remind me to tell you about my last surfing safari, back in the ’90s–a story featuring me, a six-four swallow-tail and a bag of dog feces floating in the fetid waters off the coast of Huntington Beach.)

Good times! The wildfires burning in the watershed of inland SoCal are likely to turn most of our beaches into muck; few will be so bad as Long Beach’s–thanks to the incomprehensible persistence of the World War II-era Long Beach Breakwater. Keeping the breakwater is like diverting your toilet into your pool. Predictions:

* Following the 2003 California wildfires in the inland watershed, researchers–and anybody with eyeballs–said water quality declined dramatically. Fire destroyed inland pumping stations, and dumped ash into streams and rivers bound for the ocean. We will be told to stay out of the water.

* Update: We’ve just seen Malibu residents waved out of the water.

* The fires will lead the Bush Administration to shout about the need to “manage” forests–that’s what happened after the 2003 round of fires. Here’s how they put it back then: “Controlling forest fires reduces sediment runoff into coastal watersheds as a result of catastrophic wildfires.” Solution: Logging.

The Sierra Club said the Bush plan used “the forest fire issue to cut the public out of the public lands management decision making process and to give logging companies virtually free access to our National Forests” Worse, the Sierra Club said, the scientific consensus is that logging proposed in the Bush plan “can increase fire risk.”

Tags: alamitos bay, breakwater, feces, george w. bush, Long Beach, poop, sierra club, surfing, water quality, wildfire