America's Dirtiest Beaches: Here Is The Poop

Don’t get too excited about being at the beach until you’ve seen this report. (Photo: Getty Images)

What have we dung to our beaches, America? Passed in 1972, the Clean Water Act set the goal of all waterways in the U.S. being safe for swimming. However, 46 years later, a new report entitled “Safe for Swimming? Water Quality at Our Beaches” showed just how poopy a job our country has done in striving for this goal. The report revealed that over half of the 4,523 beaches tested in 2018 “ had potentially unsafe levels of fecal contamination on at least a day.”

Not just contamination. But fecal or poop contamination. And not just fecal contamination. But potentially unsafe levels of fecal contamination. If this turns your resting beach face into a look of disgust, you may be justified.

As you can imagine, poop in the water is not good. The only time poop in the water is good is if it is in a toilet bowl and you are not inside the toilet bowl. Poop contains lots of bacteria. Some of this bacteria can make you sick like certain strains of Enterococcus and E. coli.

The analysis in the report defined “potentially unsafe levels” as poop bacterial as levels exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Beach Action Value (BAV) threshold. The BAV threshold represents the poop bacteria levels at which approximately 32 out of every 1,000 swimmers would get sick. This varies depending on the type of poop bacteria. For example, for Enterococcus, this BAV threshold would be 60 colony-forming units per 100 milliliters (cfu/100mL), and for the bacteria E. coli 190 cfu/100mL. Of course, swimming in water that exceeds these thresholds doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get sick but the odds of getting sick increase with increasing amounts of bacteria. Over 13 percent (or 605) of the beaches had levels that went beyond such thresholds in at least 25 percent of the days that samples were collected and tested.

If you think that simply staying away from dirty beaches and sticking to clean ones is the answer, just hold on, in the words of Wilson Phillips. First, take a look at the breakdown by region:

Region	Beaches Tested	Beaches Potentially Unsafe (> 1 day)	%
Gulf Coast	385	329	85
Great Lakes	558	418	75
West Coast	850	573	67
East Coast	2,373	1,134	48
Total	4523	2,620	58

None of the regions came out looking particularly clean. Then there’s this breakdown of beach sites tested and the number that may be potentially unsafe for at least one day by State and Puerto Rico:

State	Beaches Tested	Beaches Potentially Unsafe (> 1 day)	Beach with Most Potentially Unsafe Days	Number of Unsafe Potentially Days
Alabama	25	21	Fairhope Public Beach in Baldwin County	21
California	584	466	Inner Cabrillo Beach in Los Angeles County	85
Connecticut	113	81	Byram Beach in Fairfield County	6
Delaware	23	7	Slaughter Beach in Sussex County	16
Florida	263	180	Bayou Texar in Escambia County	24
Georgia	26	13	St. Simons Island Lighthouse in Glynn County	6
Hawaii	218	90	Keehi Lagoon (North) in Honolulu County	11
Illinois	19	19	South Shore Beach in Cook County	38
Indiana	23	22	Jeorse Park Beach in Lake County	40
Louisiana	24	24	North Beach in Calcasieu Parish	11
Maine	85	39	Goose Rocks Beach in York County	14
Maryland	158	79	Camp Pecometh in Kent County	9
Massachusetts	583	223	Nahant Bay at Eastern Ave. in Essex County	39
Michigan	207	120	St. Clair Shores Memorial Park Beach in Macomb County	26
Minnesota	42	25	New Duluth Boat Club landing facility in St. Louis County	16
Mississippi	21	21	Gulfport East Beach in Harrison County	44
New Hampshire	47	15	State Beach in Rockingham County	5
New Jersey	356	133	Beachwood Beach West in Ocean County	14
New York	422	276	Tanner Park in Suffolk County	48
North Carolina	213	127	Intersection of E. Main St. and Tooley St., Belhaven in Beaufort County	11
Ohio	58	56	Bay View West in Erie County	48
Oregon	51	18	Sunset Bay State Park Beach at mouth of Big Creek in Coos County	11
Pennsylvania	28	27	Beach 11 in Thompson Bay in Erie County	17
Puerto Rico	139	76	Playa Guayanes, Yabucoa in Yabucoa Municipio	16
Rhode Island	129	54	Easton’s Beach in Newport County	10
South Carolina	122	55	Withers Swash in Horry County	32
Texas	167	141	Cole Park in Nueces County	52
Virginia	37	19	North Community Beach in Norfolk City	7
Washington	215	89	Sooes Beach in Clallam County	7
Wisconsin	125	104	Cupertino Park in Milwaukee County	40

Of the 29 states listed here, only a few did not have a majority of beaches tested with at least one potentially unsafe day. Delaware, yes Delaware, had the lowest percentage. But you still may want to think twice about going to a place named Slaughter Beach.

What’s going on here? Are people just taking lots of dumps in the water? Sort of, indirectly. The fecal contamination is coming from sewage and waste materials being dumped into the water. As the report indicated, the primary sources are, “urban runoff, sewage leaks and overflows, and industrial-scale livestock operations.”

Urban runoff is not people with bad diarrhea sprinting in cities to find bathrooms. Instead, it’s when rainwater or melting snow can’t seep into the ground because of pavement and buildings and instead “runs off” to lakes, oceans, and other bodies of water. This water then carries various pollutants such as stuff from cars and factories and, yes, poop with it into the bodies of water.

When rain and pollution has nowhere to go, it runs into the waterways. (Photo: Getty Images)

All of this can be bad for your health. If someone needs to tell you that swimming in poop is not good, then please don’t invite me over for a pool party. In the short term, water contamination can cause reactions or infections in various body parts including your skin, your eyes, and your gastrointestinal tract. A study published in the journal Environmental Health found that around 90 million water recreation-related illnesses occur in the U.S. each year, costing $2.2 to $3.7 billion annually. Over the long term, who knows how chronic exposure to such contamination could increase your risk of different chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Moreover, continuing to flush junk into our waterways can disrupt the animals and plants that live (or in some cases used to live) in the lakes and oceans, which in turn affects your diet and thus your health. Yes, everything is connected in a system. So even though you don’t have pipes that directly connect your toilet with your refrigerator, pollution and inadequate sewage systems and waste disposal may in effect be doing so.

It’s time to take water pollution more seriously and stop treating our bodies of water like giant toilet bowls. One thing that you can do is push for at least some of the changes recommended by the report. For example, increasing and improving green infrastructure would allow better absorption of rainwater and melting snow and reduce the run-off that is occurring. Also, our aging sewage and water monitoring systems are long-overdue for updating and improvements. Then, there’s the manure issue. Livestock will keep producing it, so you can’t just tell them to stop it. Rather, there needs to be better ways to reduce manure pollution such as keeping the poop away from croplands and other areas and perhaps even halting expansion of the livestock industry. Finally, the report advocated for more regular testing and monitoring of beach pollution and contamination and posting warnings on beaches when conditions become potentially unsafe.

As a reminder, this report focused only on the bacteria found in poop and not all the other pathogens such as viruses, chemicals, trash, and other pollutants being discarded into the lakes and oceans. Thus, just because the bacterial counts are below BAV thresholds doesn’t mean that the water is completely safe. As with all things in life, poop is not the only thing that should concern you.