Published August 6, 2004
Pollution-induced beach closings and advisories in Florida more than doubled last year. Better monitoring likely played a role.
By David Royse (Associated Press), The Miami Herald
TALLAHASSEE - The number of beach closings and advisories about excessive ocean pollution more than doubled in Florida last year, a national environmental group said Thursday.
Some of the increase, however, can be attributed to better water-quality monitoring.
The Natural Resources Defense Council said the 307 beaches in Florida monitored by health officials for pollution were closed or had swimming advisories 3,986 times in 2003, up from 1,745 in 2002. The national environmental group annually compiles a list of closings and advisories caused by pollution.
Some of the increase is likely because of better monitoring, the group notes. In August 2002, the state Department of Health expanded its beach monitoring from once a week to twice a week.
Stricter requirements for deciding when coastal water is considered polluted was also at work. The standard for the amount of fecal coliform bacteria that must be present for water to be considered polluted was lowered.
The data for Florida beaches is based on state Health Department testing for coliform and another bacterium called enterococcus.
Other reasons cited for the spike by the council included an increase in rain in 2003, which leads to polluted runoff from cities eventually flowing into the ocean.
A spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, Russell Schweiss, said the state also just began monitoring for enterococcus midway through last year, so the higher number of closures would be affected by that, too.
Bay County in the Panhandle, home to popular tourists spot Panama City Beach, had the highest number of instances when beaches were closed or under a pollution advisory in 2003, a total of 538, the group said.
Monroe County had the third-highest amount of closure or advisory days, with 346, while Broward County had the 10th-highest amount at 200 -- many of them at George English Park. That number is up from 10 in 2002, the group said.
Miami-Dade meanwhile had 42 days of closures or advisories, up from 31.
Across the country, there were more than 18,000 days of closings and advisories in 2003 at ocean and Great Lakes beaches, an increase of more than 51 percent from 2002.
Linda Young, Southeast director for the Clean Water Network, said that it's good that more monitoring is being done, but that Florida needs to do more to stop the pollution that's getting into Florida's coastal waters.
All the closures in Florida were for elevated levels of bacteria, but the state Department of Health, which keeps track of monitoring in each of the counties, didn't collect data about where pollution is coming from, Young said. That makes it hard to determine how to fix the problem, she said.