At a Glance

Heavy downpours have washed tons of trash into Southern California rivers.The rivers dumped the trash onto beaches.Harmful bacteria also flow into the water, and recent levels have been stunningly high.

Recent rainstorms in Southern California have dumped tons of garbage and other debris on the area's beaches.

Greg Fellers, a board member of the environmental group , told the Los Angeles Times the is the worst he has in 10 years of cleaning up beaches.

“It was disgusting. It looked like a landfill,” Fellers said.

The San Gabriel River flows for 58 miles through Orange and Los Angeles counties before reaching the ocean near Seal Beach. Along the way, the river picks up all type of refuse.

During the recent storms, the San Gabriel deposited a enough garbage to create a heap a half-mile long, 20 feet wide and almost 3 feet high, the Times reported.

Tony Soriano of the , which also organizes beach cleanups, told KTLA TV recently.

“We had people who surfed out here sitting on the couch … just making a joke out of it,” he said.

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Similar trash fields cropped up at Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, where the Santa Ana River reaches the Pacific Ocean, and at Long Beach Harbor, where the Los Angeles River ends.

The trash heaps include plastic bottles and plastic foam, baby diapers, baby strollers, orange traffic cones and , the Orange County Register reported.

“It was horrifying, that’s the only way I could explain it. It was phenomenally sad,” Trish Gussler, who was visiting Seal Beach last Sunday, told the Register.

The San Gabriel River flows for 58 miles through Orange and Los Angeles counties before reaching the ocean near Seal Beach. Recent rainstorms pushed trash and other debris into the river that was then dumped onto Seal Beach.

(Tony Siriano of Huntington/Seal Beach Surfrider Foundation)

School teacher Pam Conti regularly collects samples at the beaches for her class at the Pegasus School to test the water quality. Last week, she took samples from Newport and Huntington beaches, Seal Beach and Doheny State Beach.

“We test for enterococcus bacteria, an indicator species for worse types of bacteria like E. coli,” Conti told the Register. “If enterococcus is present, that means these other more serious, infection-causing bacteria are most probably also present.”

Conti's tests are the same type used by the counties to determine the levels of bacteria in the water. Results are reported as the most probable number, or MPN. The state standard MPN for water quality is 104.

The results from Conti's tests showed San Gabriel River’s MPN was 4,374, Santa Ana River’s at 1,989 and San Juan Creek’s at 6,586, the Register reported.

“It’s typical to have these numbers during large storm events; all the pollution and animal feces, or possibly human, is coming downstream from cities,” Conti said.

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On Thursday, the Save Our Beach group pushed much of the trash on Seal Beach into mounds so that it could be picked up by bulldozers.

Fellers, the board member, says they want to work with public officials to create plans to reduce the pollution.

“It would take a concerted effort,” he told the Times. “Every city that has a storm-drain system ought to have a catch system – some way of catching at least the larger articles that are floating in the water to filter it out.”