Coastal Beach Safety Monitoring

AB 411 established California's beach water quality monitoring program and amended Health and Safety Code Section 115880-115915. AB 411:

• Requires weekly bacterial testing from April 1 to October 31 at public beaches:
  • Visited by more than 50,000 people each year and
  • Located near a storm drain that flows in the summer
• Directs the California Department of Health Services (now the California Department of Public Health or CDPH) to adopt minimum bacterial standards and posting requirements, the foundation of today's Beach Program

These Health and Safety Code sections contain the core legal requirements for protecting public health at California's public beaches. They:

• Establish minimum sanitation standards for beaches
• Require bacterial monitoring of waters along high-use beaches near storm drains
• Direct local health officers to:
  • Inspect beaches
  • Investigate complaints
  • Post warning signs when standards are exceeded
  • Close beaches when untreated sewage reaches the water

Title 17 contains the regulations that implement the Health and Safety Code requirements for ocean beaches and water-contact sports areas. It sets the specific numeric bacterial standards for total coliform, fecal coliform, and enterococcus that trigger postings and closures, defines how and where samples must be collected, and outlines the corrective actions local health officers must take when standards are not met. 

SB 482 (Kehoe, 2011) transferred responsibility for directing California's beach water quality monitoring program from the CDPH to the State Water Board, effective January 2012. Under this change, the State Water Board became responsible for establishing and reviewing monitoring protocols, site locations, and monitoring frequencies, while local health agencies continue to carry out monitoring and issue postings and closures within their jurisdictions. The CDPH retains the responsibility to establish, maintain, and amend as necessary, minimum protective bacteriological standards. 

AB 1876 (Chan, 2004) expanded California's beach monitoring program by extending the definition of "public beach" to include public beaches within the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. This brought Bay Area beaches under the same monitoring framework that already applied to ocean beaches along the California coast.

The BEACH Act amended the federal Clean Water Act to strengthen water quality protections at the nation's coastal and Great Lakes beaches by:

• Directing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set recreational water quality criteria
• Providing grant funding to states for beach monitoring and public notification programs

California uses BEACH Act grant funding to support local agency monitoring and the statewide BeachWatch database. 

California is committed to monitoring, improving, and protecting beaches along its coast.  The State Water Board currently allocates about $2.3 million of state and federal grant funds annually to the local health agencies based on their program size and number of mandated monitoring locations.

In addition to monitoring our coastal water quality, California also invested an additional $100 million in Clean Beach Initiative grants to fund local projects that reduce bacterial contamination along the coast.

Reliable monitoring depends on reliable data. The State Water Board maintains a statewide Quality Assurance Program Plan for the Beach Program that sets consistent standards for how samples are collected, handled, and analyzed across all sixteen participating agencies.

• Laboratories analyzing beach water samples must be accredited through California's Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program (ELAP) and follow analytical methods approved under the federal Clean Water Act.
• Local agencies follow quality assurance and quality control procedures, including those in the Quality Assurance Program Plan, which describe sampling locations, collection techniques, and laboratory methods used.

More information on quality assurance can be found on these U.S. EPA and State Water Board quality assurance and quality control websites.

All monitoring results flow into BeachWatch, the State Water Board's statewide beach water quality database. From there, data are shared with the California Environmental Data Exchange Network (CEDEN), which makes California's surface water quality information publicly available in one central location, and with the U.S. EPA's Beach Advisory and Closing Online Notification (BEACON) system, the federal database for beach water quality nationwide.

This connected system allows beach water quality data to support a range of uses, from day-to-day public health decisions by local agencies to statewide water quality assessments and federal reporting.