Russ Zimmer

@RussZimmer

Before summer is over, Jersey Shore beaches will have violated water-quality standards for safe swimming more often than anytime in the past five years, according to an Asbury Park Press analysis of more than 52,000 water samples taken from Shore beaches since May 2005.

What we found:

By the beginning of August, more samples from Jersey Shore beaches had come back on the wrong side of water-quality benchmarks than during all of 2015. That's with nearly two months of weekly tests still to come.

In fact, the number of dirty samples is at its highest rate in New Jersey since 2009 — more than 1 in 25 this year are too high for swimming.

From 2013 to 2015, beaches in about 20 towns produced high samples each year, but it's been more widespread in 2016. The state tests beaches in 54 towns and so far in 2016 37 towns have had at least one unsafe test result.

Regulators are looking for unhealthy levels of a kind of bacteria associated with human and animal waste. These nasty microbes can be accompanied by disease-causing viruses that can cause diarrhea, rashes and other unpleasant reactions if contacted by humans.

Despite these findings, New Jersey still ranks ahead of Florida, Massachusetts, New York and most other states when it comes to beach water purity.

Watch the video above for the five beaches that "failed" the most since 2005

New Jersey's tests themselves are a point of contention among water quality advocates.

They argue that these weekly tests are structured in a way that don't confront the realities of the water pollution landscape today.

“If people don’t know and public policy decision-makers are not aware (of the problems) then we don’t make progress on improving water quality,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action.

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Practically every summer week, we see the results of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Cooperative Coastal Monitoring Program.

Most recently, seven Long Beach Island beaches were forced to warn bathers that bacteria counts in the water had jumped beyond safe limits, if only for a day. Nineteen beaches issued bacteria advisories in the first week of August, and two were later forced to close temporarily to protect public health.

But don't go trashing your beach chairs just yet, New Jersey beaches are fine to swim or splash around in on most days, compared to most other states. Ocean beaches, as opposed to the more troublesome river or bay beaches, only come up dirty about once in every 100 tests.

And part of the reason that we hear so much about beach advisories and closures is because New Jersey's monitoring program, which was one of the nation's first, is relatively robust.

"We're the only state that (surveys the coast by plane) six days a week, looking for anything that would effect bathing water quality – slicks, debris, anything that might wash up on a bathing beach, there's a sensor for chlorophyll (to detect algae)," said Virginia Loftin, the longtime leader of the monitoring program."We have extraordinarily good water quality and many years of experience monitoring these beaches."

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But state regulators concede the the testing program has barely changed in the past 30 years, despite a changing lineup of pollution sources. But they also point to this consistency as a strength — it's easier to compare 1986 results to 2016's when much of the testing process is the same.

Despite more expeditious technology being available — though more costly and with some legitimate question marks — the testing method used by New Jersey, and most everyone else, cannot tell you if the water you are swimming in today is unsafe until tomorrow.

That means the best tool for beachgoers who want to know if the water is fit for themselves or their family is to simply find out if rained in the last 36 hours.

Storm runoff is believed to be the modern day conduit through which fecal bacteria makes its way from land to water.

"The bottom line is that the water quality along the Shore here in New Jersey and across the nation depends on the rain," Zipf said. "That’s not the best way to run a water quality protection program – to hope that it doesn’t rain.”

What can happen?

Though no longer littered with needles and rarely touched by raw sewage, Shore beaches do still suffer sporadically from the effects of pollution in the form of animal (and sometimes human) waste. Ingesting water mixed with these microbial menaces could result in a nasty stomach bug or itchy rash.

Every year, more than 180 million people visit beaches in America and every year 3 million or 4 million get sick from swimming in tainted beach water, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Rashes and diarrhea are the most common maladies.

Just ask Jamie Houman, a Toms River woman who is convinced that the conjunctivitis, sometimes called pinkeye, that sent her to the emergency room last month was caused by a dip in the ocean.

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Houman told the Press that she spent the day at an Asbury Park beach and then woke up in the middle of the night and could barely open her eyes.

"If I had them open or closed, it felt like there was a bunch of gritty sand in my eyes," she said. "I tried to do things at home like rinse them out but nothing helped. The ER doctor had to numb my eyes and then I had to put drops in several times a day for about a week."

There have been no cases of waterborne illnesses attributed to the beach this year, according to the New Jersey Department of Health. However, department spokeswoman Donna Leusner said that "it is often impossible to discern where an infection was contracted."

Houman's doctor told her it wasn't a slam dunk that the infection resulted from contact with ocean water and none of the Asbury beaches came close to exceeding bacteria counts in the week before or after her beach trip.

But it's those type of stories that can damage the reputation that New Jersey has been trying to rebuild.

There can be no doubt that the water quality in the state has much improved since 1988, when there were more than 800 beach closures in a single summer.

In fact, New Jersey waters today compare favorably against most other states that have similar beach water monitoring programs, the Natural Resources Defense Council found in a 2014 report on coastal water quality..

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In 2013, for instance, New York beaches failed water quality testing 13 percent of the time, according to the NRDC report, while the Press's analysis shows New Jersey's failure rate was under 2 percent that year.

The beaches are the crown jewels of the tourism-dependent Jersey Shore, attracting nearly $20 billion in visitor spending in 2015, according to research group Tourism Economics.

State regulators here are fond of pointing out that the state's swimming beaches are open 99.9 percent of the time, both this year and last, compared to 95 percent nationally.

What do we really know?

The state is testing for enterococcus, which is a kind of bacteria that grows in the intestines of mammals, including humans. Enterococcus is what scientists call an indicator bacteria, meaning its presence is considered a harbinger of dangerous but harder-to-detect pathogens.

So every Monday, somebody from a county health department wades into the surf at each of the 210 collection points on the Shore and captures a water sample that is transported to a laboratory where it is evaluated.

The rub is that the lab culture takes roughly 24 hours to yield results, meaning that the information on whether it's safe to swim comes a day too late to be used for beachgoers.

“I go to these water conferences and I ask for something that’s the equivalent of pregnancy test — you dip into the water and you have your answer," Loftin said. "That doesn’t exist.”

There is a method out there that takes about four hours to process, but the DEP says it lacks the federal guidance on where to draw the line between what readings are safe for swimmers and what aren't.

The EPA told the Press that they have given states guidance on how to interpret those results, but the DEP says that no federal standard has been established for it to enforce.

Both federal and state officials note that even with a four-hour turnaround time there are real-world challenges that make same-day notification difficult to execute and potentially not worth the trouble.

"Besides having a laboratory that is close enough to the beach to allow samples to be quickly transported, prepared, and analyzed, beach or program managers should consider factors including cost, configuring laboratory facilities, choosing an appropriate instrument, and providing adequate staff training," the EPA said in a statement to the Press.

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The state uses the testing data to identify problem areas and work on solutions, Loftin said.

In Beachwood, where more violations have been logged since 2005 than anywhere else in the state, DEP researchers used the data to justify repairs to nearby storm sewers and to relocate drainage pipes that had been funneling potentially contaminated storm runoff right by where people swim.

There are other aspects of the DEP's testing protocol that seem outdated.

For instance, the state does the weekly testing on Monday. The DEP says the start of the work week was chosen during designing of the program in order monitor how local sewage treatment plants had handled the tourist-heavy weekends.

But today, through much public effort and treasure, Shore treatment plants are rarely ever sources of fecal pollution.

Now rainfall, which carries animal waste from roofs and asphalt through storm sewers and into streams and rivers, is the primary predictor of water quality.

So if it rains up and down the Shore on Sunday night, Mondays test samples might look particularly disturbing and grab some headlines. If it rains Thursday night, however, there's no test results scheduled to tell the weekend crowd what beaches to avoid.

"We’ve chipped away at all of those major pollution sources and now we see (high test results) only when it rains," Zipf said. "That is progress but maybe we should be changing our water quality testing program with that in mind."

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Russ Zimmer: 732-557-5748, razimmer@app.com