Rhode Island beaches were much healthier this summer, at least when compared to last year’s data.

Beach Closures Declined Sharply

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

Photo by Will Collette

The number of beach closure days imposed by state health officials sharply declined this year. According to data from the Rhode Island Department of Health, beaches around the state were closed for a combined 71 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the traditional summer season. Last year closures reached an all-time high, with DOH officials closing beaches for a total of 284 days, the highest number since 2006.

DOH orders beaches closed when they test positive for elevated levels of enterococci, a kind of gut bacteria that is used by federal and state health officials as an indicator for fecal waste contamination in bodies of water. Any beach with water testing higher than the standard of 60 colony-forming units (CFU) per 100 milliliters is automatically closed by DOH until the tests produce a passing result again.

Overall the bacteria represents a small health risk for swimmers and bathers. Swimming in contaminated water can cause gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the stomach and intestines that can cause symptoms such as vomiting, headaches, and fever. It can also result in ear, eye, and throat infections, and in more serious cases salmonella.

Over the past 20 years, the prime culprit for elevated levels of enterococci in Narragansett Bay has been linked to how much rainfall is received by the state’s watersheds in the summertime. Stormwater runoff control is the name of the game. Rain falling on impervious surfaces — think roads, roofs, and all other types of pavement — has to go somewhere, and as the rainwater makes its way through drainage systems and ultimately into Narragansett Bay, it picks up a lot of stuff — lawn fertilizers and animal waste in particular — that can contaminate it and cause issues.

Intense storms wrought by a warming climate that dump a lot of water in a short amount of time contribute to beach bacterial infection.

Rainfall may be the big contributor to bacterial infection in beach waters, but it’s not a perfect trend line. According to data from the National Weather Service, Rhode Island received 14.98 inches of rain between Memorial Day and Labor Day. That’s only a small decrease over the previous year, which saw 16.13 inches of rain, despite record beach closures that year.

Municipalities have improved their stormwater abatement over the past two decades, helped by the Narragansett Bay Commission’s ambitious combined sewer overflow project. Warwick, which historically has struggled to fully implement sewers in its coastal neighborhoods, has nearly completed its 40-year project to connect all its homes to municipal sewer.

Of the 29 closure orders issued by DOH, seven were Warwick beaches, with the longest closure order assigned to Conimicut Point Beach, ordered to close for four days in late August.

Like last year, it’s still the state’s inland beaches that see the longest closures. The single longest closure this year was Hope Community Service Pond beach in Scituate, which was ordered to close for 10 consecutive days in July, and was closed for 14 days overall this summer. The runner-up for most-closed beach was Kingston’s Camp in South Kingstown, closed by DOH for a total of nine days this summer.

It’s a big turnaround compared to last year, when South Kingstown’s beach at Camp Hoffman was closed for nearly a month — 27 consecutive days last summer. That data doesn’t include cyanobacteria blooms, which are tracked separately by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and only overlap with a handful of beaches in the state such as Camp Hoffman or Little Beach at Scituate’s Slack Reservoir.