A Beach of Primal Beauty, Despite the Ravages of Mankind

In the distance, something in the crashing surf caught Shannon Walsh’s eye. “Chris,” she demanded over the ocean’s roar, “is that something spouting out of the water? A whale or something?”

Chris Ferman, who knew these waters, followed her gaze toward the base of a high, rocky promontory. The surging white sea and half-submerged boulders made it difficult to tell a whale from a wave on the rugged stretch of Palos Verdes coastline. “Yes, it is!” Ferman, 24, assured his 20-year-old companion, a Pennsylvania native making her first visit to the Point Vicente tide pools.

Seconds later, however, he was wavering. “You know, that could be a rock.”

“No, it’s a whale,” Walsh protested. “It’s moving!”

He squinted a long moment. “No, you’re blind,” he concluded with a laugh. “That’s a rock!”

The good-natured debate seemed to set the tone for an idyllic afternoon on the wind-swept shoreline below the defunct Marineland aquatic park. The rocky, crescent-shaped beach was nearly deserted except for a few hunched human figures moving, crablike, over the treacherous terrain.

A coastal fog was blowing in, sparing the peninsula from the high temperatures inland, and the solemn tones of a foghorn added to a kind of lazy serenity.

Ferman, a Redondo Beach resident who has been coming here since childhood, was showing Walsh the amazing animals of the tide pools--except that he could not find as many as he once had. “I used to be able to see sea cucumbers . . . abalone . . . starfish,” he recalled, glancing up at the crashing waves. “Now you can hardly see any of that. It’s all fished out, and there’s tons of garbage.

“(But) it’s still worth coming down,” he added quickly. “It’s real pretty here.”

The Palos Verdes coast compares in its splendor to points near Big Sur or La Jolla, according to some who take the zigzagging dirt trail down to the tide pools. But this is also a place where natural scenery and habitat find themselves bombarded constantly by the flotsam and jetsam of an urban metropolis.

For decades, an underwater pipeline on the Palos Verdes coastal shelf has been the dumping place for partially treated sewage processed by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. The flow--325 million gallons a day--is known to contain a variety of heavy metals, petroleum byproducts and impurities that use oxygen in the water.

Although the pollutant levels in the discharge have been reduced dramatically in recent years, some biologists have seen a strong correlation between the opening of the outfall in 1937 and an overall reduction in the number and variety of offshore animals.

“The old-timers have told me about seeing abalone three-deep (on the rocks), and I can remember guys going in, even in the ‘40s, and (bringing up) 300 or 400 pounds of lobster in knee-deep water,” said Rimmon C. Fay, 63, a noted authority on marine life in Los Angeles who collects offshore animals for scientific study. He said the Palos Verdes shelf was, at one time, an extraordinary habitat because of the way the peninsula juts into an ocean current in the shelter of offshore islands.

“There was nothing like it anywhere on this coastline,” he said. “Maybe not in the world.”

As the metropolis grew, sewage volumes increased. In the 1960s, high levels of DDT--produced by a Montrose Chemical plant--helped to make the county sewage outfall one of the nation’s biggest pollution sources for that pesticide. Whether for that reason or because of other factors, kelp beds virtually disappeared at Palos Verdes and other forms of marine life dwindled in number.

After a federal ban on DDT in 1972, the quality of waste water dumped on the Palos Verdes coast began to improve markedly under stiffening federal and state regulations; in fact, one county sanitation official said the discharge of heavy metals has been reduced by 95% and that of other pollutants by 80%.

Yet the dumping continues--a necessary evil of urban life--and scientists are still debating the extent to which it has altered, or is altering, the coastline. By most accounts, the area is getting cleaner but is far from fully recovered. Kelp beds are back, but other types of sea life are still dwindling, for reasons that are unclear.

El Nino, the periodic warming of California waters, is considered a suspect in the spread of a bacterial disease that has wiped out much of the starfish population, said marine biologist Susanne Lawrenz-Miller of San Pedro’s Cabrillo Marine Museum.

Poachers and collectors, she said, also may have had an impact on some species. And the disappearance of abalone--the large, edible mollusks that cling tightly to rocks--remains one of the tide pools’ biggest mysteries, she said. A good many may have been carried away in buckets; but many succumbed to a wasting disease of unknown cause that left the animals unable to hold to a rock surface.

“Abalone are just about nonexistent now on the peninsula,” Lawrenz-Miller said. “Nobody quite knows why.”

Crabs and sea urchins--and many other tiny organisms--are still here, but they share the rocks with less exotic things: beer cans, empty motor oil bottles, a golf ball, old car tires, a green bikini bottom.

“Condoms!” said a laughing Evelyn Estrada, 29, of Long Beach, strolling the beach and recalling the most unusual items she has found at Point Vicente. But, like many visitors, she said the place “is still beautiful.”

Tamara Winter, 21, of Rancho Palos Verdes talked of how blue and beautiful the water looked, while her date, Tim O’Donnell, 24, of Seal Beach found himself drawn to four or five rusted hulks of automobiles lying at the base of the steep bluff.

“You always wonder if it’s a stolen car, or somebody crashed, or what,” he said. “It’s probably a little of both.”

Catherine Onouye, 19, of Torrance said she enjoys the short beach--an ecological preserve now--mostly for the romantic setting afforded by a high outcropping of rock near the beach’s north end, even though the eons-old rock is splattered with graffiti.

“It’s like a real escape,” said Mark Waring, 28, who was with her. “I hate L.A., in general, in terms of lifestyle. This is like untouched coastline.”