The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has unveiled an updated and expanded beach and harbor protection program composed of an array of surveillance, sampling and funding activities to safeguard beaches and bays in New York and New Jersey and the health of the people who enjoy them.

Using its helicopter, ships and cutting-edge technologies, the EPA’s initiatives and scientific assessments will go farther in 2008 than ever before. Of particular importance are the results of a study of a new rapid method for testing beach water and improvements to a federal, state and local plan to spot and collect floating debris before it can wash up on area beaches.

“New Jersey and New York beaches are among the best and highest quality beaches in the world, and among the most extensively monitored,” said Alan J. Steinberg, EPA Regional Administrator. “EPA’s investments and year-round work with our federal, state and local partners has paid off, so that people who go to the beach can relax and enjoy all the beauty that New Jersey and New York’s coastlines have to offer.”

Working together with other federal, and state and local agencies, the EPA’s program to monitor for floating debris has been expanded to cover a wider area and will now operate seven days a week. The results from EPA’s 2007 assessment of a new rapid method of testing beach water for bacteria that cause gastrointestinal illness show promise as a beach monitoring tool. Conventional methods require 24 hours for results, while the new methods can provide results in as little as three hours after sample collection. The EPA will continue its assessment of this rapid test technology this summer to further refine this new method and evaluate results under various environmental conditions.

The EPA’s comprehensive science-based beach and coastal water program has many additional components, including shellfish bed water quality monitoring, grants to states to help with their beach monitoring and public notification programs and the development of pollution discharge budgets (total maximum daily loads) for the New York/New Jersey Harbor and the New York Bight. This summer, the EPA will use its boats to collect water samples and further assess the influence of nutrients on dissolved oxygen levels. As it does every summer, EPA scientists will fly over the New York/New Jersey Harbor in EPA’s helicopter searching for floating debris, and it will again collect water samples near shellfish beds.

For more information on EPA coastal water activities, visit: www.epa.gov/region02/water/oceans.

Source: U.S. EPA