Poche Beach Cleanup Moves Forward

San Clemente's notoriously scummy Poche Beach could get a little cleaner because of steps by the city and county.

Orange County Parks officials have won permission to bulldoze the sand berm that holds back stagnant water in the scour pond, which frequently floods the underpass walkway to the beach. The Army Corps of Engineers, California Regional Water Quality Control and the Coastal Commission had to sign off on the procedure, called “notching,” which should stop persistent flooding of a boardwalk under the highway and train tracks, according to an OC Parks release.

“We are happy that the county can now clear the channel as needed,” San Clemente City Councilwoman Lori Donchak said in the release. “Our residents and visitors will greatly benefit from the improved access to Poche Beach.”

, Poche now has However, the system was until this year, when officials got a temporary permit to send the beach's effluent down into the surf.

Before April, officials were forced to drain the water into a stagnant pond, which re-grew the fecal bacteria removed from the purifcation system.

George Edwards, a civil engineer at OC Watersheds, said the purification system has been running great all summer, removing 99 percent of bacteria before sending the runoff into the surf.

But runoff isn't the only culprit behind the dirty water.

"Numbers are increasingly indicative that shore birds are in large part responsible for the contamination," Edwards said.

The city of San Clemente commissioned a study,, indicating that bacterial slime in closed sewer drains added to the problem at Poche, but the large numbers of seagulls that congregated at the scour pond and in the surf were also to blame.

Mary Vondrak at the city of San Clemente said staffers are notifying all the necessary agencies -- like Fish and Game and the Water Quality Board -- to get permission to send a falconer down to the beach as part of a trial program to keep the gulls from congregating on that stretch of beach, but there has been no action on that move yet.

Editor's note: The method used by the purification system was misstated in an earlier version of this article.