New study ranked some of America’s most-polluted beaches. How did Beaufort County do?
Beaufort County has repeatedly been recognized as having some of the most beautiful beaches in the nation, but a new study says they’re clean as well.
Last year, researchers with nonprofits Environment America Research & Policy Center and Frontier Group tested for water pollution at 4,532 sites on United States beaches. Almost 60% of the places sampled had unsafe water pollution levels on at least one day, the newly released report shows.
Majority of the days — 98% percent, actually — beachgoers in Beaufort County can swim and play in the water without fear of potential contamination.
Twenty-eight beaches in Beaufort County were tested, and only seven of those had even one “potentially unsafe” day, the report said. Each beach in the county was tested 10 or 11 days.
Four of the seven beaches were on Hilton Head Island; two were on Harbor Island; one was on Hunting Island.
Comparatively, of the five South Carolina counties touching the ocean, Horry County had an average of 20% of “unsafe” days; Beaufort and Georgetown counties had 2%; and Colleton and Charleston had 1%.
In South Carolina, 122 beaches were sampled, and 55 were found to be potentially unsafe on at least one occasion.
All 10 of the state’s beaches with the “most potentially unsafe swimming days” were in Horry County.
Nearby Chatham County, Georgia, averaged 17% unsafe days, with a beach on Tybee Island noted as one of Georgia’s sites with the highest number of potentially unsafe days. It was found to have contamination three of the 46 days its water was tested.
On the entire East Coast, 1,134 beaches of the 2,373 tested showed contamination at least once during the testing.
Researchers determined sites were potentially unsafe based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most protective threshold when examining bacteria levels. The EPA threshold recommends states use it as a “conservative, precautionary tool for making beach notification decisions.’” That level of contamination would result in an estimated 32 in 1,000 swimmers falling ill, the report said.
