Mercury find complicates harbor permits

A routine application for a dredging permit in Newport Beach has yielded a pollution mystery that city water-quality experts are now trying to solve.

It’s nothing serious, city officials are quick to point out, but recent tests showed small amounts of mercury in the harbor where none has been found in the past. Because of it, the city had to modify its dredging permit application, which will be considered in October, to the California Coastal Commission, and some homeowners may have to wait longer to dredge under their docks.

The city of Newport Beach holds a “regional general permit,” a sort of blanket permit that allows residents to do maintenance dredging under their docks without having to get separate permission from the Coastal Commission.

The city’s permit expired in January. The commission will decide next month whether to re-up it, allowing up to 20,000 cubic yards of sediment to be removed.

Newport Beach has held general dredging permits for about three decades. To get a new permit, the city has to analyze samples of sediment from the bay. In doing that, mercury turned up in the western part of lower Newport Bay, city harbor resources manager Tom Rossmiller said.

It wasn’t much. Asst. City Manager Dave Kiff said the mercury likely was detected because the testing is more precise than last time the city applied for a permit.

Each time the city requests a permit, Kiff said, “The technology and the science gets a little bit better and the regulatory agencies are a little more stringent in requiring additional testing.”

Mercury was found in three areas: two spots in the west Lido channel and one by 15th Street on the Balboa Peninsula, Rossmiller said.

When people eat fish contaminated with mercury, it can damage their immune system or nervous system, and it can harm developing embryos.

Only a small amount of mercury was detected, and in further tests it didn’t show up in marine animals, so it would likely have a minimal effect — if any — on the environment, he said.

But it was a surprise, and it led the city to take the three contaminated areas out of the application for the blanket dredging permit.

That means some residents — Rossmiller said roughly 60 homeowners — in those areas might have to wait if they want to dredge. Kiff said there’s already a backlog of people asking to dredge under their docks.

It’s not clear where the mercury came from, but Rossmiller said there’s so little of it, the source may be hard to find.

“You’ve got to realize we’re looking at about 0.75 to 3 parts per million of mercury, hence a very small needle in a haystack,” he said. “It could be as simple as someone throwing a battery off their boat.”