Sunday, July 07, 2013
Check out your favorite beaches in this water quality report
by Larry Geller
The National Resources Defense Council has released its report, Testing the Waters 2013 A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches. Hawaii’s report is here (pdf).
How did we do? The report includes a table listing testing on every beach on every island (not all beaches are tested, and frequency varies).
In general, Hawaii was
Ranked 4th in Beachwater Quality (out of 30 states) 4% of samples exceeded national standards for designated beach areas in 2012
The report discusses contamination in Nawiliwili Bay and Hanalei Bay on Kauai, the the problem of injection wells used for wastewater disposal on Maui.
Overall, it looks like 2012 was a good year, but the report notes that this may be due to drought conditions that reduced runoff into the oceans. Kauai looks like the only island with significant problems.
Anyway, you can read the report at the link above and see how the beach near you is doing.
Now, if you’d rather go to a pool instead of one of Kauai’s beaches, better read this report first:
According to data just released by the Centers for Disease Control, on any given day, in any random pool, there are 58 percent odds that the water in which you're swimming — the water that's swishing around in your mouth and getting in your eyes — contains E. coli. In the view of the CDC, this "indicates that swimmers frequently introduced fecal material into pools and thus might transmit infectious pathogens to others."
[Atlantic Wire, Bring Your Own Chlorine! CDC Finds 58% of Pool Water Has Traces of Poop, 5/16/2013]
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