Narragansett Bay Reports

Testing The Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches

2006-08-03

Executive Summary

As the new home of RIPIRG's environmental work, Environment Rhode Island can be contacted regarding this report.

In 2005 there were more beach closings and advisories than at any other time in the 16 years the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has been tracking them. The number of closing and advisory days at ocean, bay, and Great Lakes beaches topped 20,000, confirming that our nation’s beaches continue to suffer from serious water pollution.

This year’s report is different, however—and more complete. For the first time, we were able to determine not only the number of closings and advisories, but also the number of times that each beach violated current public health standards. NRDC found 200 designated swimming beaches that violated public health standards at least 25 percent of the time. Those violations indicate that the beachwater was contaminated with human and animal waste, and that beachgoers were either swimming in that waste or banned from doing so due to the health risks.

This year is also different because on the day we release this report we will also file a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to adequately protect from waterborne disease the more than 180 million Americans who go to the shore every year.

The EPA missed its congressionally mandated October 2005 deadline to revise the current public health standards for beachwater quality, which are outdated and inadequate. The agency now says it will not be able to finish updating the standards, as required by the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health Act of 2000 (BEACH Act), until 2011.

NRDC is suing to force the EPA to accelerate its timetable for proposing new standards, to set standards that fully protect the public, and to establish testing methods that will enable public health officials to make prompt decisions about closing their beaches and issuing advisories. Today’s beachwater quality standards, which were set in 1986, use obsolete monitoring methods that may leave beachgoers vulnerable to a range of waterborne illnesses.

Dirty coastal waters not only threaten our health but hurt our economy. Coastal “tourism and recreation constitute some of the fastest growing business sectors—enriching economies and supporting jobs in communities virtually everywhere along the coasts of the continental United States, southeast Alaska, Hawaii, and our island territories and commonwealths,” according to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.1 That translates into new employment opportunities: In 2000, U.S. coastal tourism and recreation generated 1.67 million jobs, a 41 percent increase from 1990, earning workers $13.8 billion in wages. Annual economic output nearly doubled during the same time period, to $29.5 billion.

But U.S. “beachonomics” might have been more robust if not for the condition of our coastal waters. Some 45 percent of our waters assessed by state agencies are not clean enough for fishing or swimming, according to EPA data from 2000, the most recent year for which national information is available. In 2005, 8 percent of all water samples taken at beaches across the country exceeded the national daily bacterial standard—the outmoded standard that the EPA was supposed to update to adequately protect the public. Americans need to know that the waters in which we swim, surf, and dive are safe. At a minimum, that means that recreational waters must be tested regularly, and the results must be measured against effective health standards. When waters do not meet these standards, authorities must promptly and clearly notify the public.

Over the last 16 years Testing the Waters has helped trigger the expansion of beachwater monitoring programs across the United States and prompted Congress to pass new laws—particularly the federal BEACH Act of 2000. Between the time NRDC first issued this report in 1991 and the passage and implementation of the BEACH Act, monitoring programs were initiated or expanded in 13 coastal and Great Lakes states: Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas. And as a result of federal grants now available to states through the BEACH Act, every coastal and Great Lakes state has a monitoring and public notification program in place.

But if authorities are doing a better job of monitoring beaches than in the past, that monitoring also reveals the extent to which they are failing to clean up the sources of beachwater pollution. Closings and advisories are rising steadily, and most authorities are not even attempting to identify pollution sources, much less control them. Further improvements to monitoring and public notification programs should include expanding the programs to cover all designated coastal beaches and popular inland beaches. Meanwhile, if successful, NRDC’s lawsuit will prod the EPA to move more quickly to implement a new health standard.

Finally, in addition to those needed improvements in the federal standard, it is time for the EPA and state and local authorities to seriously address the sources of beachwater pollution, which most often is stormwater and sewage pollution. Prevention is the best way to make sure that a day at the beach will not turn into a night in the bathroom or, worse, in a hospital emergency room.

[Previous] [Next]