South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
What’s in the water?
Florida beaches aren’t as clean as you think they are
There’s something in the water in Broward County. Most of the time, the health department won’t tell you about it.
In Florida, health departments in counties such as Palm Beach tell you immediately when there’s too much fecal bacteria in the water. Broward and Miami-Dade health departments don’t.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel analyzed Florida beach advisories from the past decade and found that counties vary drastically when it comes to how often they warn swimmers about poor water tests. The state allows that discretion, and it means that beachgoers in some counties — among them Broward — are likely being exposed to harmful bacteria.
According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:
Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties each warn the public about dirty beach water three times as often as Broward.
In six of the past 10 years, Broward health officials issued no health warn
ings for high bacteria at the beach at all. Palm Beach and Miami-Dade had only one year each with no advisories.
The beach warning disparities in South Florida reflect a statewide problem — county health officials are not required to let residents know at the first sign of toxins. Broward waits for a second test, and by then the bacteria is typically gone. But swimmers may have been exposed for days.
Could Broward beaches really be that much cleaner than those to its north and south? It’s difficult to say, in part because Broward health department officials declined to answer questions from the Sun Sentinel. Despite multiple requests, Candy Sims, spokeswoman for the Department of Health in Broward County, would only refer a reporter to the Florida Healthy Beaches website.
Officials with the Florida Department of Health say geography plays a role, and may contribute to higher bacteria at certain beaches.
Local health departments choose when they notify the public
A look behind the numbers showed that the Florida Healthy Beaches program relies on judgement calls of local health officials when it comes to telling the public.
Lapses i n reporting beach conditions can put beachgoers — especially the elderly, children and those with autoimmune disorders — at risk of stomach illness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and skin rashes.
The health departments in the state’s coastal counties test their beaches for fecal bacteria, called enterococci, as part of the state’s Healthy Beaches program.
When counties get a poor test result, they have two choices: warn the public right away, or test again. If a second test turns up a poor result, local health departments must warn the public.
The retesting process can take up to four days, and during that time swimmers could be exposed to harmful bacteria. By the time the second results come in, the bacteria has often been washed away, though there’s no way to know when exactly the water became clean again.
“The data shows a majority of beaches that have a poor test result will return to acceptable levels of bacteria by the time we collect the resample,” Bob Vincent, an environmental administrator at the Florida Department of Health, wrote in an email.
The Palm Beach County office of the state health department warns swimmers after the first poor test. The Broward office of the state health department waits for a second test.
That long process of retesting creates risk, said Valerie J. Harwood, chairwoman of the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“That leads to a lag in the protection of public health,” Harwood said. “You test the water on Monday. The results come back on Tuesday, and all day Monday and Tuesday people are swimming. Then by Wednesday, when you issue the advisory and everyone’s out of the water, or you retest the water, it’s actually OK to swim in by then.”
In Broward, advisories rarely go out, even when Palm Beach and MiamiDade have issued several. That’s what happened this week, when beaches in all three counties tested poor on Monday. Palm Beach County issued notices as soon as the first poor result showed up at two beaches.
Miami-Dade and Broward both held off, waiting for re-samples. When the results finally came back on Thursday, Miami-Dade had to issue advisories for five beaches, out of 14 that had originally tested poor. King tides contributed to the high bacteria, sending the bacteria-laden stew in swells to the shore.
On Monday, four beaches in Broward were teeming with bacteria, but the local health department issued no warnings to swimmers. Broward retested Wednesday and found the bacteria was gone.
Beachgoers can check out water testing results on their own. It could take a couple of days, but the results of each test eventually show up on the Healthy Beaches website, regardless of what health departments do or don’t tell the public. Harwood recommends keeping an eye on the results instead of waiting for an advisory to go out.
“That way you’re not relying on judgment calls or differential policies,” Harwood said.
Weak oversight, lax accountability
The state’s health department chalks up the disparities in South Florida water warnings to the environment at the beaches.
“What we typically see are trends on the beaches,” said David Polk, the Healthy Beaches Program coordinator and environmental specialist at the Florida Department of Health. “Ones behind the barrier islands and Intracoastal Waterways are worse than the Atlantic beaches themselves.”
However, according to the available EPA data, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties each had only two more test beaches last year in a partially enclosed waterway than Broward. But Broward still issued far fewer advisories than the other two South Florida counties.
The EPA keeps records of the water sample results for beaches, but the data can be incomplete. The Sun Sentinel found incomplete records in the federal database for some Florida counties and some years.
When asked about the discrepancy, the health department said it would coordinate a fix with the EPA.
The gaps in testing and information available to the public has miffed water advocacy groups so much that they’ve stepped in to do their own testing.
The Surfrider Foundation, an activist network dedicated to protecting the ocean with local chapters globally, established a Blue Water Task Force made up of volunteers who test Florida’s beaches.
“At Surfrider we realized there was a huge gap in the beach testing,” said Holly Parker, the group’s Florida Regional Manager. “Our Blue Water Task Force program was a response to the budget cuts, and has helped fill that gap with results to keep people informed.”
Parker said volunteers test on Thursday, so results are available closer to the weekend when more people are at the beaches. In Broward, the local chapter tests primarily near the outflow pumps where treated sewage shoots out into the ocean near the Pompano Beach Pier and Harrison Street in Hollywood.
Little information is available that shows the effects the contaminated beaches have on swimmers. Symptoms usually subside on their own without a visit to the doctor, and the Centers for Disease Control, which tracks diseases from bodies of water, doesn’t track when swimmers get sick from the beach.
The Surfrider Foundation tries to keep tabs with a website where swimmers can self-report when they feel sick after going to the beach. People around the world submit their reports. Last month, three illnesses apparently came from beaches in Miami-Dade, and one surfer said he had bad stomach pains for a couple days after he went in the water in Deerfield Beach.
“One of the reasons it’s so valuable to have this data to analyze, aside from human health concerns, is that it shows us where we need to work and the issues we need to deal with that cause a lot of these hotspots to show up,” Parker said.
Just before Hurricane Dorian brushed Florida’s eastern coastline in early September, Broward residents complained of sludge in the water near Pompano Beach and Lauderdale-bythe-Sea, especially near the piers.
Water samples near the pier in Pompano Beach tested poor in the weeks before the storm, and some beachgoers reported smelling sewage.
After Dorian passed, Broward’s health department did a test in the area, which came back negative for feces or evidence of feces near the pier or surrounding areas. A water quality expert found only “numerous amounts of compacted seaweed.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Melody Kloepfer, a Palm Beach Gardens resident who said she visited Lauderdale-by-the-Sea’s beach after Dorian and spotted poop on the shore. “You could see it was everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like that. The beaches did not say they were closed, there were people surfing in the water and there were families there.”
Kloepfer, 45, said she couldn’t believe it.
“You can’t even wrap your head around it being that bad,” she said. “I mean, who is responsible for closing the beaches due to unsafe bacteria levels?”
Brooke Baitinger can be reached at: bbaitinger@ sunsentinel.com, 954-422-0857 or Twitter: @bybbaitinger