Study finds disturbing amount of fecal contamination at U.S. beaches
As the summer season gets underway, a new report finds that many coastal U.S. waterways, including popular beaches for swimming, are contaminated with unsafe levels of fecal bacteria.
After sampling water sites around the country, the Surfrider Foundation, an ocean protection advocacy organization, found unsafe levels of fecal contamination at 19% of the 9,095 water samples. Of the 496 sites sampled, 301 — 61% — had at least one sample from last year that tested above the recreational water health standard.
“I wasn’t surprised by the numbers,” J.P. Brooker, the Ocean Conservancy’s director of Florida conservation, told Yahoo News, citing past studies. “The fact is coastal water in Florida, and other areas of the country, is badly hampered.”
‘Combined sewer overflows’
During storms, U.S. beaches are often inundated with runoff from streets and sewers, bringing bacteria into the ocean or inland waterways such as rivers and lakes.
Pavement doesn’t absorb water the way forests, wetlands and other natural areas do. Many older cities have a combined sewer system collecting rainwater runoff, sewage, and industrial wastewater into one pipe. In heavy rains — which are increasingly common due to climate change — sewage treatment plants can become overloaded, leading them to discharge untreated sewage directly into the water.
The Surfrider Foundation study pertained to coastal beaches, but “combined sewer overflows” also are common in the Great Lakes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In rural and suburban areas, water contamination is traced back to private septic systems, which drain liquid waste through a field.
“Septics and cesspools, when it rains, can leach effluent out into local waterways,” Mara Dias, Surfrider’s water quality initiative senior manager, told Yahoo News.
Health risk
Exposure to fecal pollution presents a variety of health risks, experts say.
“The most common symptoms are rashes, ear, nose and throat infections, gastrointestinal,” Dias said. Swimmers with an open cut also risk infecting their wounds.
Because these are common ailments, however, there isn’t good data on exactly how many illnesses are caused by contaminated swimming water, Dana said. But there are certain incidents in which a clear line can be drawn from water contamination to infections.
In the aftermath of sewage spills caused by Hurricane Ian last fall, southwestern Florida experienced an outbreak of Vibrio vulnificus, a potentially deadly “flesh-eating” bacteria.
How to tell if a beach’s water is dirty
Many state or local governments monitor the presence of bacteria in the water at heavily used beaches during the summer and post warnings online. In Massachusetts, for example, there are 17 beaches as of this writing deemed unsafe for swimming.
But experts say the monitoring is inadequate because many beaches are either not tested or not tested often enough.
“A lot of beaches that don’t show chronic contamination end up not getting monitored because there’s limited resources,” Ryan Searcy, a water quality researcher at Stanford University, told Yahoo News.
Searcy advises beachgoers to try to find state monitoring data on a beach before going, but also to follow some precautions.
“There’s a few rules of thumb: the first is trying not to recreate at a beach during wet weather or within the last 3 days of wet weather,” he said. He also advises avoiding swimming “near piers or jetties that might cause water to stagnate and not circulate,” and “being cautious not to swim near flowing storm drains or rivers” where bacteria-filled runoff may be discharged.
Possible solutions
Clean water advocates say Congress should invest more money in upgrading water infrastructure, such as replacing septic systems and combined sewer systems with separated municipal sewer and storm water pipes, which need to be properly maintained. Dias also calls for “more funding in the EPA’s Beach Act program, so the states are able to do more testing on where it’s safe to swim.” (The program has been authorized for $30 million per year of spending but only received around $10 million per year for the last two decades, according to Surfrider.)
Replacing a combined sewer system with a separated system in a large city could be prohibitively difficult and expensive, Dias acknowledged. In those places — like New York City, where just 1/10 of an inch of rainwater can overwhelm the sewer system — cities need instead to better absorb rainwater to prevent overflows through measures like street tree planting, Dias said.
“The strategies focus around green infrastructure to lessen the burden of stormwater that goes into the system: rooftop gardens, other diversions for stormwater to actually soak into the ground and not become runoff in the first place,” she said.
