What color is your beach?
Coastal waters get red, yellow or green rating for levels of harmful bacteria
Dirty water issues have been made more dangerous during the pandemic, according to a group working to solve Texas’ pressing environmental issues.
More people are crowding the beaches in efforts to socially distance while retaining some sense of a normal summer, said Anna Farrell-Sherman with the Environmental Texas Research Policy, a nonpartisan group.
The group released its annual “Safe for Swimming?: Pollution at our Beaches and How to Prevent It” report in July.
At any given moment, there is traceable and harmful amounts of fecal bacteria in Texas Gulf Coast waters, from Sea Rim State Park in Southeast Texas to Boca Chica State Park in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
The Texas General Land Office works with local health department officials along the state’s shoreline to monitor the water’s bacteria levels for enterococcus, a bacteria commonly found in fecal matter. Testing is typically conducted every three days to a week.
After large rain events, bacteria swarms the beaches, FarrellSherman said.
“I think the fact that 90 percent of our beaches in Texas are unsafe to swim in at least once a year — that speaks to a really big problem with runoff pollution,” she said. “It’s something that’s not only gross, but it can make us sick.”
The Texas GLO’s Texas Beach Watch program is partially funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. The goal is to provide information about water quality at selected recreational beaches in Aransas, Brazoria,
Cameron, Galveston, Harris, Jefferson, Matagorda, Nueces and San Patricio counties.
Each beach’s measured bacteria level is recorded as green, yellow or red, with green being the safest and red being the most dangerous. The EPA-recommended maximum amount allowed for enterococcus bacteria is 104 colony forming units (CFU) per 100 milliliters of water. When it reaches this red level, swimming and fishing while standing in the water is not recommended. The low green level means bacteria counts less than 35 CFU per 100 milliliters, and the medium yellow level is between 35 and 104 CFU per 100 milliliters.
“It’s a variety of causes, but most of it comes from our agriculture and industrial-sized farms. Manure is used as fertilizer, and if it’s not carefully stored, it can wash into the water, streams and, eventually, the oceans,” Farrell-Sherman said. “It can also come from the municipal system and sewage spills. We don’t have the infrastructure to slow down the water, so it rushes directly into our waterways.”
In 2019, nearly 1 of every 8 surveyed beaches in 29 coastal and Great Lakes states and Puerto Rico showed “potentially unsafe levels of pollution on at least 25 percent of the days that sampling took place,” according to the report’s fact sheet. More than half of the 3,172 beaches reviewed were potentially unsafe for swimming on at least one day, the report stated.
Human contact with contaminated water can result in gastrointestinal illness, respiratory disease, ear and eye infection and a skin rash. At least three of these symptoms mirror COVID-19 symptoms.
There are an estimated 57 million cases of recreational waterborne illness in the U.S. every year, according to the group.
While Texas Beach Watch monitors harmful bacteria yearround, it’s impossible to know if a person will get sick when they enter the water.
“Unfortunately, there’s no way to see the pollution when you go to the beach. That’s why we think the most important solution is to actually keep the pollution from getting there in the first place,” Farrell-Sherman said. “The thing people ask me the most is if they are going to get sick if they go in the water. There’s no way to tell.”
Possible solutions to contaminated water runoff include the development of nature-based infrastructure systems that will slow the water and soak it into the ground, she said. Most streets and highways were not built with this in mind.
Once those “slow-down” mechanisms are put in place, Farrell-Sherman said a number of issues will be addressed from flooding, drought and urban heat.
The group has proposed policies to protect Texas beaches from unsafe pollution, including increasing state funding to fix sewage systems and install natural infrastructure; protecting wetlands, which will filter out bacteria and other pollutants; and enacting moratoriums on new or expanded industrial livestock operations.
“We shouldn’t be worried that the water will make us sick,” she said. “Here in Texas, this is something we need to pay attention to to fix — it’s not that hard to fix.”