Are You Swimming in Feces at the Beach?

If you love to go to the beach and swim, think again.  Here is a report from environmentamerica.org:

Fecal contamination makes beaches unsafe for swimming. Each year, people suffer an estimated 57 million illnesses — including nausea, diarrhea, ear infections, and rashes — from swimming in U.S. waters.

Our beaches are at risk. Runoff from paved surfaces overflows from aging sewage systems, and manure from industrial livestock operations all threaten the waters where Americans swim. These pollution threats are getting worse with climate change, as more extreme precipitation events bring heavy flows of stormwater.

• Sprawling development has created more impervious surfaces that cause runoff pollution and has destroyed natural areas such as wetlands that protect beaches from contamination. From 1996 to 2016, U.S. coastal regions added 4.2 million acres of development, while losing 640,000 acres of wetland and nearly 10 million acres of forest.
• America’s sewage infrastructure is deteriorating and outdated. Many communities, particularly around the Great Lakes, still use combined sewers that were designed to discharge sewage directly to waterways during heavy rainfall. Sanitary sewers, which are designed to carry sewage alone, can also spill dangerous sewage if they are not properly maintained — and they overflow as many as 75,000 times each year in the U.S.
• The rise of factory farms has resulted in large concentrations of livestock manure that cannot be stored safely and is often overapplied to crops. All too often, rainfall washes excess manure from cropland into our waterways, where it can put swimmers’ health at risk. Animal manure can also contain pathogens that are resistant to antibiotics, creating added risk to public health.

• As of May 2021, sampling data for 2020 from 3,166 beaches in 29 coastal and Great Lakes states and Puerto Rico was available through the National Water Quality Monitoring Council’s Water Quality Portal.
• Of those beaches, 1,689 (53 percent) had bacteria levels indicating potentially unsafe levels of fecal contamination for swimming on at least one day, and 328 were potentially unsafe on at least 25 percent of the days that sampling took place.
• Swimmers could also be at risk at additional beaches where no bacterial testing was conducted or available through the Water Quality Portal.

A new report dated July 2021 has been published and posted on the website of environmentamerica.org.  You can look at the area where you plan to swim and see where swimming is potentially unsafe.  Watch local news stations for beach closings and updates.  Sometimes beaches that have high levels of fecal bacteria remain open.  Newscasters in Texas reported on beaches still open with fecal bacteria.

For more information visit environmentamerica.org