Report ‘suspicious’
of isle beaches’
spotless health record

WASHINGTON >> A national environmental group has questioned how well Hawaii beaches are monitored for water quality after the group learned that no isle beaches were reported closed in 2003.

Nationwide, beach closures and advisories warning beachgoers to avoid swimming in coastal waters that did not meet safety and health standards increased by more than 50 percent from 2002 to 2003, according to a report released earlier this month by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The report found more U.S. beaches closed to swimmers last year because of unsafe water than at any other time in the last 14 years.

However, officials in Hawaii, which had 11 beach closures in 2001 and 52 in 2002, said no beaches were closed last year, according to the report.

Nancy Stoner, the report's director, said an infrequent water-monitoring system that tests only half of the state's 376 beaches designated by the Environmental Protection Agency could be responsible for the findings.

"There's always some set of beaches that they are not monitoring," Stoner said. "That's a bad thing.

"Maybe they are monitoring at some place that's cleaner, or maybe it hasn't been raining as much -- but it's suspicious, don't you think?" Stoner asked.

The state uses a rotational water-monitoring system that checks water quality in 33 core beaches every year for five years, plus an additional 19 or 20 beaches, according to the council's 14th annual report.

State Department of Health spokeswoman Janice Okubo said the state was forced to adopt the five-year program because it would be impossible to check all beaches daily.

"Our issue is we are an island, so we have a lot of coastal water," she said. "Because of resource limitation, we had to prioritize some beaches."

The council found in 2002 that infrequent water-quality testing in 14 popular Hawaii beaches may have put swimmers at risk of becoming ill. According to its findings, authorities at those beaches rarely monitored water quality and lacked programs to notify the public when problems occurred.

Those 14 Hawaii beaches were included on NRDC's 2003 "Beach Bums" list. They risked receiving pollutants from storm water runoff or sewer lines, and at least 100 visitors visit them on a summer weekend or holiday, according to the 2003 report.

Stoner said no Hawaii beaches made the Beach Bums list this year "because we didn't have the information."

"It doesn't mean, necessarily, that they didn't monitor those beaches," she said. "But it also doesn't mean they did."

Okubo said water at the 14 beaches that the NRDC deemed as poorly monitored are checked "on a rotational basis."

Mark Dorfman, the report's author, faulted the rotating system for failing to check popular beaches.

"I think the drawback is the fact that they don't monitor every beach," he said, adding that introducing a more constant program "is a question of funding and priorities."

To counter the program's shortcomings, Okubo said authorities post signs when sewage spills or rainfall overflows reach shores to warn swimmers away from water that could be contaminated.

Honolulu city spokeswoman Carol Costa noted, "We've been getting our number of spills way down." She added that the city has embarked on "an aggressive" spill-reduction effort since 1994, spending $900 million to fix the city's 1,800-mile-long sewage line.

Costa also disputed NRDC's claim that swimmers could have been at risk at two of the 2003 Beach Bums -- Diamond Head and Sunset beaches -- because "we have had excellent results" in those two beaches.

"We have an excellent water quality in Hawaii," she said. Costa added that while she could not speak for the entire state, she could not recall extensive beach shutdowns on Oahu in 2003.

The NRDC report, prepared by scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists, found that nationwide, the number of beach-closure and advisory days jumped to at least 18,284 during 2003, a 6,206-day increase over the previous year. Storm-water runoff was the main culprit, but increased monitoring also discovered problems that had not been reported before.

"The more we look, the more we find," Stoner said. She blamed the Bush administration for slashing $500 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which helps municipalities build waste-water plants and fund other pollution controls.

Beaches in Florida and California had the most closures and advisories, with well more than 3,000 in each state, according to the 2004 report. South Carolina saw 593 closures and Washington state had nine.

Beach closures mean no one can use a beach, while advisories warn swimmers not to enter the water, Stoner said.

Jeff Mikulina, director of Sierra Club's Oahu chapter, challenged Hawaii's system for measuring beach closures and said environmental worries are often overlooked by economic concerns. In an e-mail, he called it "an imperfect metric for gauging water health."

Mikulina said he recalls "a number of sweeping warnings about water quality along the south and windward shores last fall."

"With little or no actual monitoring, short-staffed departments, and motivations not to officially 'close' a beach (such as affect on tourism impacts), it's surprising that they get closed," he wrote.

NRDC cited an April 2004 preliminary report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy that said ocean-related tourism created 1.5 million jobs and brought $58 billion to the U.S. economy in 2000. Stoner said instead of ignoring the problem, coastal states could improve their economies by starting water-monitoring programs.

Often, she said, "They thought it was better not to look."

Swimming in contaminated water is the leading cause of waterborne illnesses, which affect millions of people each year and can be fatal, Dorfman said. Most likely to become ill are children, pregnant women and those with weak immune systems.

Stoner said a nationwide increase in beach monitoring and water sampling as well as the failure of local authorities to detect polluting sources such as sewage spills and runoff were responsible for deeming more beaches unsafe.

Bacteria levels exceeding sea-water quality standards were responsible for 88 percent of closures last year. Precautionary closures after rainfall accounted for 6 percent, while 4 percent of closures were due to sewage treatment and pipe failures.

Stoner said more states are launching surveillance and testing programs by using grants awarded through the federal BEACH Act passed in 2000. Because of such new programs, beach closures in Florida accounted for more than a third of the total national increase.

For 2004, Hawaii received $324,230 in BEACH Act grants, according to NRDC.