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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040816/misc/16beach.htm
Pollution is closing scores of beaches this summer and scaring swimmers away from thousands more By Alex Markels
Sick kids. "If it's called 'baby' or 'kiddie' beach, chances are that it's going to pose an elevated health risk," says Mark Gold, an environmental scientist who heads California's Heal the Bay, a nonprofit group that recently dubbed Doheny California's worst "beach bummer." "Yes, the risk of drowning is substantially less at those beaches," Gold says. "But because they're enclosed and often near storm drains, the water stagnates and the pollution just sits there." Gold and other activists say regulations on storm water runoff aren't nearly as tough as they should be, while treatment of agricultural runoff is largely voluntary. For their part, EPA administrators say there is little that can be done without first knowing the precise sources of the pollution. So they have focused on improving testing. The BEACH Act of 2000 requires states to adopt minimum water quality standards, improve monitoring, and issue warnings about pollution. The EPA recently announced that it would force 25 states that have yet to adopt its standards to do so by the end of the year. And it has launched a website listing water quality conditions at thousands of beaches nationwide. Mixed signals. Yet even with better monitoring, it's often a crapshoot whether the postings accurately reflect current conditions. That's largely because standard tests for fecal bacteria and E. coli take up to three days to yield results, "which is a lot like trying to navigate the freeways using traffic information that's two or three days old," says Stanley Grant, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California-Irvine.
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