Ocean City, which received a four star rating (out of a possible 5 stars) from the NRDC has a unique situation regarding its swimming beaches and the quality of the water its visitors swim in.
In California, New York, and indeed many Maryland swimming areas, stormwater runoff drains to pipes that empty into the same water body people are swimming in. After a rainfall, a lot of those swimming areas are closed because of high bacteria levels.
No wonder, year after year, Ocean City gets to claim it has the cleanest beaches in Maryland. Yet thousands of visitors to Ocean City and Worcester County also swim, fish and recreate in the water of the bays and creeks behind Ocean City, without knowing what the quality of the water is from week to week.
Remember the movie "Jaws?" The movie was set in Amity - A town so dependent on tourism the town fathers decided it was ok to let the big white shark pluck a few juicy tourists off their inflatable mats from time to time rather than announce the problem and shut the beach down.
So how would you feel if you knew the beach towns all over the country were doing the same thing? OK, so it's not sharks and the danger may be more related to skin rashes and ear infections, but the fact still remains that _______________(insert the name of your local beach here) doesn't want anyone to know that the water might contain any type of hazard.
When I announced the Assateague Coastkeeper's "Swimmable Bays" program for the summer of 2010 you would have thought I was standing on the bridge screaming "Sharks!" at every passing car. No one actually wanted to know just how swimmable the waters of our Coastal Bays are. In fact, one business owner actually said, "Don't test the water near me, you'll put me out of business."
Worcester County regularly monitors the swimming pier at Public Landing for bacteria levels. Bacteria levels in 2006 exceeded EPA swimming beach standards so many times, Worcester County made the Natural Resources Defense Council's "Testing the Waters" list of worst swimming areas in the State of Maryland.
The county had known there was a problem in the water at Public Landing for years. Besides a small community of homes on aging septic systems with non-existent nutrient reduction technology, the worst offender seemed to be the large paved parking lot, that attracted seagulls and dogs, drained all rainwater runoff directly into Chincoteague Bay right next to the pier.
The county had been sitting on plans (and funding) to retrofit the parking lot storm drains with filters and install a vegetative buffer between the lot and the bay, but had relegated the work to the bottom of the to-do list. With pressure from the Coastkeeper and the funder after the release of the NRDC 2007 report the work was finally completed in 2008 and current testing by the county shows a marked reduction in unsafe bacteria levels in 2009.
State regulations only require Worcester County to monitor bacteria levels at 'public swimming beaches' and in the entire Coastal Bays watershed, only the pier at Public Landing is considered a 'public swimming beach.' In 2009 the County also began to monitor the water in Sinepuxent Bay adjacent to The Castaways Campground. Ocean City monitors the ocean swimming waters along their shoreline, and the State Park and National Park Service monitors their oceanfront shorelines.
Yet every summer, thousands of people swim or recreate in the waters of Herring Creek, Turville Creek, the St. Martin River, and Isle of Wight, Assawoman and Sinepuxent Bays. Kids are towed on floats, people jet ski or waterski, private campgrounds provide private swimming beaches in these waterways. Not exactly a 'public swimming beach', but these ARE our local water holes, after all.
Interestingly, all of Ocean City's stormwater runoff from streets, parking lots, roof-tops, storage lots drains straight into Isle of Wight and Assawoman Bays. None of this chemical/oil/bacteria/trash laden soup flows into the ocean waters off OC's pristine beaches. Lucky for Ocean City! If their stormwater drained to the ocean side, like so many other coastal towns, mandatory testing would cause swimming beach closures after heavy rainfalls.
Oddly, I don't actually expect to find the bay waters to be in bad shape, my expectation is that, except for a few places where there are problems related to things like lawn runoff or street runoff after storms, the bays will test out pretty well.
But who will know unless someone does this monitoring? My project has been funded by the Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore and other private funders. I've taken EPA and State courses on water sampling protocols. The actual analysis will be done at a lab, and I had hoped to partner with Salisbury University's lab for that part of the project.
However, even after a successful presentation of my project to the lab's directors and a plan ready to execute I found myself back to square one after the Directors of the SU lab informed ACT they would not be able to do the project with us. (** see my added comment, below.)
And while I was assured it had nothing to do with the fact the lab is also partially funded and used by MDE for a source tracking project, it did make me realize this might have put them in an awkward position since my main objective over the last two years has been to attempt to get MDE to actually do the job they are charged with. Waterkeepers Chesapeake and Coastkeeper have been taking MDE to task for lax enforcement of state discharge permits and our legal challenge against MDE's poor administration of construction site stormwater management permits was settled with MDE improving many aspects of that program.
My "Swimmable Bays" project may have a delayed start this summer, and it may take on a different scope, but it will happen thanks to additional private funding to help pay for lab analysis of the samples.
Of course I'll be making this information public by posting to the Assateague Coastkeeper's website. Look for the launch of the Coastkeepers' 'Swimmable Bays' pages at www.assateaguecoastkeeper.org soon!
Just expect a typical response from business and government, "Pay no attention to that mangled corpse. It was just a boating accident!"
