June 2011 Testing the Waters A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches twenty-first AnnuA l r eport Authors Mark Dorfman Kirsten Sinclair Rosselot Project Design and Development Jon Devine Natural Resources Defense Council About NRDC The Natural Resources Defense Council is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 1.3 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world’s natural resources, public health, and the environment. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Montana, and Beijing. Visit us at www.nrdc.org. Acknowledgments NRDC wishes to acknowledge the support of the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the Campbell Foundation, Environment Now, the McKnight Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Pisces Foundation, Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, the Summit Fund of Washington, and the TOSA Foundation. NRDC would like to thank Josh Mogerman and Robyn Fischer for researching and reviewing various aspects of the report this year and Carol James for distributing the report nationwide. Thank you to Alexandra Kennaugh for managing the production of the report, to Elise Marton for proofreading the report, to Sue Rossi for designing it, and to Kathryn McGrath, Will Tam, and Auden Shim for creating a dynamic presentation of the report on the NRDC website. We would also like to thank Ynes Cabral and Linda Escalante for their skillful Spanish translations. Many thanks to members of our media team—Courtney Hamilton, Elizabeth Heyd, Valerie Jaffee, Jessica Lass, Josh Mogerman, Jenny Powers, and Kate Slusark—for orchestrating the release of the report to the press. Thanks to David Beckman, Noah Garrison, Henry Henderson, Karen Hobbs, Larry Levine, and Suzanne Struglinski for releasing and blogging about the report for NRDC this year, and to Piper Crowell for arranging releases by chapters of Environment America. We wish also to thank the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for sharing data with us again this year, and to the state program coordinators, who provided information for the state chapters along with review of the monitoring and notification data. We recognize that this work is time-consuming and that budgets are tight all around, so we very much appreciate the effort that went into compiling and reviewing these data. Thanks, especially, to all those federal, state, and local officials who work hard every day to keep our beaches clean and to address the sources of beachwater pollution. NRDC President: Frances Beinecke NRDC Executive Director: Peter Lehner NRDC Director of Communications: Phil Gutis NRDC Deputy Director of Communications: Lisa Goffredi NRDC Publications Director: Anthony Clark NRDC Publications Editor: Carlita Salazar Project Manager: Alexandra Kennaugh Design and Production: Sue Rossi Copyright 2011 by the Natural Resources Defense Council. TesTing The WaTers: a guide To WaTer QualiTy aT VacaTion Beaches Table of Contents Executive Overview ..........................................................................................................................................................1 1. Beach Closures, Advisories, and Notices Due to the BP Oil Disaster ..........................................................................10 2. Swimming in the Great Lakes .....................................................................................................................................17 3. Plan of Action ............................................................................................................................................................24 4. State-by-State Results .................................................................................................................................................32 How to Understand the State Summaries: Beachwater Quality Monitoring Programs ...................................................32 How to Read the State Summaries .............................................................................................................................37 Methodology for NRDC’s Report ...............................................................................................................................40 Alabama Florida Louisiana Minnesota North Carolina South Carolina Alaska Georgia Maine Mississippi Ohio Texas California Hawaii Maryland New Hampshire Oregon Virginia Connecticut Illinois Massachusetts New Jersey Pennsylvania Washington Delaware Indiana Michigan New York Rhode Island Wisconsin Figures Figure EO-1: Reasons Officials Closed Beaches or Issued Advisories in 2010 ...................................................................2 Figure EO-2: Sources of Pollution That Caused Closings/Advisories, 2000–2010 ............................................................3 Figure 2-1: Percent of Samples Exceeding E. coli Standard for Great Lakes States Combined, 2006–2010 ......................19 Figure 4-1: Why Don’t 2010 Percent Exceedances Match? .............................................................................................39 Tables Table EO-1: Rank of States by Percentage of Beachwater Samples Received Exceeding the National Standard in 2010 ....4 Table EO-2: Repeat Offenders: Beaches With More Than 25 Percent of Samples Received Exceeding the EPA’s Applicable Single-Sample Maximum Bacteria Standards for Designated Beach Areas, Each Year, 2006–2010 ................6 Table 1-1: Number of BP Oil Spill Advisory Days in Alabama in 2010 ..........................................................................11 Table 1-2: Number of BP Oil Spill Advisory Days in Florida in 2010 and 2011 .............................................................12 Table 1-3: Number of BP Oil Spill Advisory Days in Louisiana in 2010 and 2011 .........................................................13 Table 1-4: Number of BP Oil Spill Advisory Days in Mississippi in 2010 ......................................................................14 Table 1-5: Sources of Information About BP Oil Spill Beach Notices, Advisories, and Closings .....................................15 Table 2-1: Great Lakes Beaches with Frequent Exceedances of the National Standard ....................................................19 Table 4-1: State Distribution of BEACH Act Funding for Beachwater Quality Monitoring and Notification for 2010 and 2011 ............................................................................................32 Table 4-2: State Coastal Beachwater Quality Standards ..................................................................................................34 Table 4-3: Policy-Recommended Water Depth Where Samples are Collected for Coastal States .....................................35 Table 4-4: Summary of NRDC’s Data and Program Information Review Process (All Dates 2011) ................................41 Appendices .....................................................................................................................................................................43 Sources of Beachwater Pollution The Impacts of Beach Pollution State Highlights iii Natural Resources Defense Council Testing the Waters 2011 TesTing The WaTers: a guide To WaTer QualiTy aT VacaTion Beaches Executive Overview NRDC’s annual analysis of water quality and public notification data at coastal U.S. beaches found that the number of beach closings and advisories in 2010 soared to its second-highest level in the 21-year history of our report. Beach closings and advisories were issued for 24,091 days in total, a 29% increase from 2009. More than two-thirds of those were issued because bacteria levels exceeded applicable standards. The portion of all monitoring samples that exceeded national health standards was essentially stable; in 2010, 8% of samples exceeded the national standard for designated beach areas, compared with 7% for the four previous years. In addition, fewer beaches were monitored in 2010 than in any year between 2006 and 2009. The 2010 results confirm that our nation’s beaches continue to experience significant water pollution that puts swimmers and local economies at risk. Although NRDC continues to push for improvements to beach water quality standards and test methods, the best long-term approach is to adopt solutions to address the sources of beachwater pollution, particularly strategies for reducing contamination carried by stormwater runoff. PolluTed BeachWaTer Makes sWiMMers sick and hurTs coasTal econoMies The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that up to 3.5 million people become ill from contact with raw sewage from sanitary sewer overflows alone each year.1 Many public health experts believe that the number of illnesses caused by untreated sewage could be much higher than is currently recognized because people who get sick from swimming in polluted recreational waters are not always aware of the cause of their illness and don’t report it to doctors or local health officials. Illnesses associated with polluted beachwater include conditions such as stomach flu, skin rashes, pinkeye, respiratory infections, meningitis, and hepatitis. Children are especially vulnerable, perhaps because they tend to submerge their heads more often and are more likely to swallow water when swimming. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that the incidence of infections associated with