With big rains, come big stressors for our precious nearshore ocean life. Trouble is flowing into our vulnerable waters.

Rain is washing debris, chemicals, acids, ashes, home and garden cleaners, insecticides, and all manner of death into the ocean waters below the recent burn areas in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

This lethal mix is devastating to ocean life.

There is a nearshore current called the inshore countercurrent that moves warmer water, including debris and pollutants, up the coast from the counties to our south. Then from NorCal, there is the southward flowing cold-water California Current.

The Santa Barbara Channel and Channel Islands are where it all mixes together, and is carried all through the area by our Santa Barbara Channel gyre current.

In other words, currents will likely bring the deadly mess to us, and then keep much of it here.

First, the Los Angeles County inshore waters will be affected, then the Ventura County coastal waters, and finally our Santa Barbara Channel and Channel Islands waters will likely bear the brunt of the deadly mix of chemicals and other pollutants.

Even without additional pollutants from wildfires, our inshore flora and fauna are stressed and often killed by what we put into the water.

These include pollution, urban runoff, agricultural products runoff, mylar balloons, fecal bacteria flowing to sea from streams, and numerous other sources.

There have always been wildfires, after which ashes and such have always been rinsed into the sea by rains. Ocean life has managed to hold up against such natural stressors.

When fires burn human habitation, storage sheds and businesses, then all manner of poisons, acids and the pollution from the melted containers that held them end up in the ocean. These are the real stressors for plants and critters in our ocean waters.

National Marine Sanctuaries are limited in what protections they can implement and enforce. The reality is they cannot prevent it or clean it up either one, other than hosting cleanup days to pick up trash along the coastlines of islands and the mainland.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) should in my opinion strive to protect against inflow of this deadly stuff. Instead, they only lock out anglers who are well-managed by fisheries management policies and practices that have sustainability as the primary goal.

MPAs have the wrong goal. We really need to focus on protections from the harmful and deadly stuffs that we generate, and which flows into the sea after big rains.