Extension Watches Sea Water Quality through Healthy Beaches Program
Contact: Esperanza Stancioff, 1-800-244-2104, George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
WALDOBORO — Local officials in seaside resort communities have a tough decision to make if they have to close a public beach because of a threat to public safety. It can affect local business.
So, sometimes a few of the municipal officials participating in the Maine Healthy Beaches program Maine don’t want to hear from Esperanza Stancioff, associate professor with University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant and state coordinator for Maine Healthy Beaches.
Response to the program, nevertheless, has been huge and the program has enjoyed 100 percent participation and cooperation, in spite of the frustration when water-quality test results are unpleasant.
Stancioff, also a marine educator and Keri Lindberg, a Maine Healthy Beaches professional also with Cooperative Extension, train and oversee as many as 85 volunteer water-quality monitors on the Maine coast. Findings are reported through an on-line database to local officials, who may be advised to either close public beaches or post water quality advisories if unhealthy water conditions exist. With funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the program is now in its third year tracking water quality and sanitation issues on 42 of Maine’s 46 public beaches.
“The towns are participating in the program and we’ve had great success,” she says. Water testing volunteers include citizens, lifeguards, firefighters, park rangers and local conservation commission members.
Their work is particularly important this summer, which has seen increased incidences of water pollution. Maine Healthy Beaches is about educating people about water quality and also about ways to maintain healthier beaches.
“To me, one of the most important opportunities in doing this work is in educating the public about land use and best practices at the beach,” Stancioff says from her Waldoboro office. “What we encourage is protection of public health. The other important outcome from the program is that we are finding that we have some pollution issues we didn’t know we had before and are beginning to work together to identify and remediate sources.”
In the past, Maine hasn’t had any structure in place to monitor coastal beach water quality to protect public health, nor an education effort for best practices at the beach by the public. The Healthy Beaches program, funded this year by a $259,000 EPA grant, has a long list of collaborators including Maine Sea Grant/UMCE, Maine Coastal Program, Maine departments of Health, Planning, Marine Resources and Conservation; in addition to nonprofits, municipalities, state parks and citizen volunteers.
In 2003, a Quality Assurance Project Plan and Notification System were developed, regional laboratories were set up, training programs and educational programs initiated and feedback mechanisms were designed into the program. In the past year, eight new state parks or municipalities were added, bringing the total to 15 state parks or towns with 30 beach management areas involved in the program.
“It’s grown exponentially. Some of these areas have never been monitored before,” Stancioff says.
The program now covers 85 percent of the beaches in southern Maine with high usage, which are monitored systematically, using quality control and quality assurance methods. As a result, Maine’s coastal beaches are safer places to recreate, Stancioff says.
Fecal contamination that can cause water to be unsafe for swimming can come from humans or wildlife, whether it is caused by an infant’s dirty diapers to failing septic systems seeping into the sea or excrement from seals, birds or pets on the beaches. In essence it comes from non-point source pollution — including as a partial list sources as yet unidentified from failing septic systems, agriculture runoff, and rotting seaweed on the beach.
“Non-point source pollution is fairly ubiquitous,” Stancioff says. “We can’t actually point to it and say ‘that’ is the unidentified source.”
There are, however, patterns that can suggest the source of coastal pollution. For instance, after a heavy rain, if the pollution levels rise, the cause might well be coming from storm water overflows, occasionally dumping raw sewage into rivers and streams in towns that have not upgraded or separated their septic or storm water collection systems. In a busy harbor with lots of pleasure boats and yachts, a cause of high bacteria counts might be logically assumed to come from overboard discharges of sewage from yachts. A systematic approach in determining sources needs to be taken, including conducting sanitary shoreline surveys and intensive monitoring of target areas, Stancioff says.
Maine Healthy Beaches website, http://www.mainehealthybeaches.org, explains the program and steps the public can take to keep beaches cleaner, along with a new feature added recently — a beach status list showing which beaches are open and which may have advisories up.
“We’ve had 2,409 hits in the last two days and 46,579 in July,” Stancioff says.