Why don't we just rename Poche Beach Poopy Beach to reflect its sorry status as a pollution chute to the deep blue sea?
A little over a week after being named one of the dirtiest beaches in the country, and despite recent efforts to clean it up, a 600-foot stretch of Poche closed Thursday afternoon due to a sewage spill. The closure to swimmers and surfers was between Camino Capistrano and Shorecliffs Beach Club.
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While singling out three Orange County beaches–including a stretch of San Clemente State Beach–among the 13 cleanest in the country, the Natural Resources Defense Council last month ranked Poche, Doheny State Beach in Dana Point and nine other beaches as “Repeat Offenders” for being the most chronically polluted in the U.S. every year.
3 Orange County Beaches are Cleanest of the Clean in U.S. (and 2 are Dirtiest of the Dirty)
Poche also routinely turns up on Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay's rankings of California's worst beaches based on nasty runoff contaminating waters.
OC Beaches Again Score Well on Heal the Bay Report Card (with Usual Bummer Suspects)
But city and county officials have not taken Poche pollution … uh … shitting down. A $3 million ultraviolet filtration system and a concerted effort to keep crap out of Poche helped the beach score A+ grades in recent months from Heal the Bay, which has given Poche F's for summer ocean-water quality every year since 2000, except for 2005 when it got a D.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.