Going to the Beach? You're Probably Swimming in Other People's Poop

Beaches, the de facto summertime destination of choice for coastal dwellers and vacationers everywhere, can be disgusting. Anyone who’s hopped over loose syringes and clumps of food packaging after veering off the Coney Island boardwalk can tell you that.

But it’s really the stuff that’s actually in the water that we should be worried about—mostly, sewage leakage (which often winds up near the shore untreated), stormwater runoff, and agricultural runoff. All that gunk can lead to unsafely high levels of bacteria in the water, and if there’s enough of it, authorities will close the beaches down. Or should close them down, and instead just let you keep swimming in it.

That’s why the Natural Resource Defense Council puts out an annual report that analyzes the level of pollution in the nation’s most popular beaches. As the report notes, the EPA “has estimated that up to 3.5 million people become ill from contact with raw sewage from sanitary sewer overflows each year.” That’s a lot. So the NRDC takes a look at a ton of samples from some 3,000 beaches, and determine which ones most often show substandard water quality levels.

For a quick idea, these are some of most polluted and most visited beaches in the nation:

• Imperial Beach in San Diego, CA
• Dixie Beach on the Gulf Coast, FL
• Indiana Dunes Beach, Lake, IN
• Grand Isle, State Park, LA
• Warren Dunes Beach, Berrien, MI
• Courthouse Road Beach, Harrison, MI
• Wildwood at Maple, Cape May, NJ
• Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY

You get the picture. Each of these beaches earned a lowly one star rating in the NRDC’s report—scan the entire list to make sure a beach near you isn’t chock full of bacteria-infested pollution. Those ratings refer both to the quality of the water and to the beach’s safety programs: “testing more than once a week, notifying the public promptly when tests reveal bacteria levels violating health standards, and posting closings and advisories both online and at the beach.”

There are only twelve beaches in the nation that get a five-star rating for health and safety.

And here’s a list of which states have the safest beaches, from least to most (Delaware’s actually good at something besides being a corporate tax haven! And Louisiana apparently hasn’t recovered from the Gulf Spill and Katrina. Either that or it’s just disgusting):

So there you have it. Check the water before you go in, or somebody else’s poop might make you sick.

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