Door County a Bright Spot on National Beach Report

The National Resources Defense Council rated Wisconsin low – 29 out of 30 – on its list of coastal states with clean beaches, but that rating might say more about our monitoring than our water quality.

Photo by Len Villano.

“We didn’t rate great last year either,” said state DNR water resources management specialist Donalea Dinsmore. “The story is the same as last year – we do a lot of monitoring. We’ve been very proactive, so our monitoring program does pick up times when we are seeing exceedances of the water quality standard.”

Other states that ranked higher just might not test their beaches as often, so they don’t always track the days beaches aren’t safe for swimming. But the monitoring habits of other states don’t dispute Wisconsin’s record of 14 percent of samples exceeding the national standards for beach safety.

The only state that ranked lower was Ohio, where 21 percent of water samples had too much bacteria to be safe for swimming.

Beaches are monitored for bacteria that indicate an unsafe presence of human or animal waste that could make swimmers sick. Wisconsin deems popular beaches “high priority” and monitors five times a week, while less popular “medium priority” beaches are monitored twice a week and “low priority” beaches are monitored once a week. Other states follow different monitoring practices.

Bad bacteria find their way to the beach from stormwater runoff, agricultural runoff or animal waste, and last summer’s drought made it harder to keep bacteria off the beach. Usually regular rains wash small amounts of runoff and waste to the beach, but since it rained so little last year the bacteria accumulated and all washed into the water at once.

That’s why identifying sources of germs and finding ways to filter them before they reach the water is a big part of keeping beaches clean.

Not all of Wisconsin beaches reached that 14 percent exceedance. Only four percent of samples from Door County were too dirty for swimming, giving local beaches the cleanest record in the state.

“Door County is pretty much a bright spot,” Dinsmore said. “They have our lowest rate of exceedance and they have the highest number of high priority beaches. Monitoring is a priority for them and they are doing everything they can to stay vigilant.”

The clean samples are likely thanks to the redesigned beaches around the peninsula engineered to filter runoff before it reaches the shore. Thanks largely to grants from the federally funded Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, totaling almost $1 million in 2010 and 2011, seven beaches in Door County have been redesigned to keep beaches clean and five more are on the docket for redesign.

“The bottom line is we’re trying to make beaches healthier, and it’s getting rid of the bacteria,” said Greg Coulthurst, a conservationist with the Door County Soil and Water Conservation department. “Most of this remediation deals with removing the bacteria from stormwater runoff … What we’re trying to do is make the beaches higher and drier.”

Building a bigger slope, planting dune grass and adding coarser sand helps filter water before it gets to the beach and make the beaches less friendly to bacteria.

“[Door County has] been proactive in doing beach restorations and following up on beach health issues,” Dinsmore said. “I just know that it’s paying off for the county in terms of making them great destinations to recreate.”

Finding funding to pay for monitoring beaches has been a challenge for Dinsmore in the last year. Historically, funding has come from the EPA but when the federal sequester forced the administration to cut its budget everything became uncertain.

Dinsmore was expecting to get nothing from the EPA, but the news came in May that the Wisconsin DNR will get some funds, $217,000 instead of $225,000, after Dinsmore had already patched together a monitoring plan with help from University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh, grants from the Wisconsin Coastal Management Council and county health departments.

Monitoring may be covered this year, but Dinsmore isn’t holding her breath for 2014.

“We don’t know what the picture is for next year, and looking at the timing and how late they came and all the things that have gone on – what do we do? How do we plan?” Dinsmore said. “It was very, very frustrating this spring. People plan their budgets a year in advance, and it’s very difficult to get last-minute funding and turn on a dime.”

The future of beach monitoring may get cheaper and more accurate. The state DNR is working on “nowcasting” programs that predict beach water safety based on things such as precipitation, wind and temperature, then can let beach managers know when they should pre-emptively close a beach. That way, they don’t have to send water samples to a lab and wait to see if the water’s clean enough to swim.

“There’s a lot of really good work going on in Wisconsin and it’s unfortunate that it gets lost in the shuffle,” Dinsmore said. “We’re all competitive – we don’t like to be at the bottom. So I always say look beneath the surface and look at the real stories.”

To read the NRDC’s report, Testing Our Waters 2013, go to nrdc.org.