The Natural Resources Defense Council's annual survey of water quality and public notification at
U.S. beaches contains plenty of bad news for anyone into wading into surf around the country without getting sick. Beach closings
and advisories hit their fourth-highest level in the 19-year history
of the report, closure/advisory days at the Great Lakes topped 20,000 for the fourth consecutive
year and even in the relatively dry 2008
beach season found contamination from stormwater runoff contributing to two-thirds of the
closing/advisory days nationally.
The hits kept coming in California as well, with 10 percent of water samples from Golden State beaches containing
more human fecal bacteria than the state allows, and violations of daily maximum bacterial standards at 227 California beaches increasing 4 percent from 2007 to 2008, and Cali ranked among the worst in beach water quality nationwide, coming
in 22nd out of 30 coastal states, according to the study.
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“Many Californians were sickened or became ill after going to polluted
beaches last year,” says Michelle Mehta, an attorney with the NRDC's
water program, in a press statement. “The problem of beach water
pollution has not improved and millions of people visiting California's
world-renowned beaches continue to be at risk.”
Los Angeles County–maintaining a dirty trend exposed in May by Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay–was home to the
most polluted beach water, with 20 percent of samples exceeding state
standards. And as the Los Angeles Times
so astutely pointed out, the latest shitty report came just days after
yet another sewage accident spilled crap into the waters of Long Beach,
forcing more closures.
But amid all this gloomy NRDC news is a silver lining for Orange County, where beaches are among the cleanest in California, if not the country, according to “Testing the Waters 2009.”
Beaches
are rated on a five-star basis, with individual stars representing
water quality in 2008, water quality over the past three years, the
frequency in water-quality testing, the promptness in issuing
advisories/closure warnings to swimmers and whether those warnings are
also posted online.
All beaches in Newport Beach received five
stars. Laguna Beach would have matched its neighbor to the north had
the beach near Hotel Laguna not received four stars and Bluebird Canyon
and Emerald Bay not checked in with three stars apiece.
Huntington
Beach city and state beaches received three stars, as did two testing
points at San Onofre State Beach and one in San Clemente (Avenida
Calafia). The other one in San Clemente, Las Palmeras, received four
stars.
By comparison, Long Beach just to the north of the
Orange County line received two stars all along its coast. That was
pretty much the norm for LA County beaches, although Hermosa Pier
received four stars and Dockweiler got threes and fours.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.