With the county’s beach water quality monitoring program kaput, you may be wondering about your odds of swimming in high levels of bacteria in the ocean. Beach closures have been growing increasingly infrequent in recent years, the result of a drop in the number of sewage spills. But closures and advisories are still relatively commonplace.
The county’s program posted 125 advisories or beach closures in 2007. Half of those — 62, to be exact — happened because high bacteria levels were found during testing.
And many of those were during the summer swimming season. High bacteria levels were found along the county’s coast 49 times between April-October 2007.