Something nasty at our town beach....
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has just released its annual beach survey, "Testing the Waters 2011." Overall, Rhode Island's beach water quality placed #18 among the 30 states in the survey. We showed some improvement from last year's testing results, although that is partly due to less rain than the historic floods we had last year.
South County beaches did a lot better than the beaches inside Narragansett Bay, as you might expect. Some of those beaches tested above the state standards for sewage contamination as much as 20% of the time. By contrast, most South County beach water samples were clean - all but a few beaches had 0% contaminated samples.
The few exceptions include Scarborough, whose two beaches had contaminated samples 10% and 11% of the time. The YMCA Beach at Camp Fuller (Point Judith) had contaminated samples 17% of the time, making it South County's dirtiest beach in this year's NRDC report (don't pee i
n the water, kids!!!).
And then there's Blue Shutters Beach, testing dirty 7% of the time. Oh the shame of it! Charlestown Town Beach was not tested, so we don't know if we have a similar problem there. But it's pretty bad to be on such a short list of dirty beaches, beaten out only by the kids at the Y camp and the unwashed masses at Scarborough.
Too bad this report didn't come out before the June 6th vote on new beach facilities. Instead of winning by 11%, the margin might have risen to 20% or more (to hell with CRABS, E-COLI and CHOLERA). I just hope the folks at Yankee Magazine don't find out.