How clean is your beach?

Troy Trent's daughters have spent a lot of time in Silver Lake, and he never gave much thought about whether the water might make them sick.

The sandy beach there is kept neat by the Everett Parks Department. Lifeguards watch over kids splashing in roped-off areas. Docks beckon visitors looking for a place to sun themselves. The sounds of shrieking children roll along the beach.

"It's a public beach. They have lifeguards," Trent said on a recent afternoon while his girls, 3-year-old Annabelle Rose and 5-year-old Chloe, toweled off nearby. "I just kind of assumed they check to see if it's clean."

But in Snohomish County, no one does check consistently. Yet, according to a handful of tests done by the state, Silver Lake was so polluted on several occasions last year that if it were located in some other counties, it would have been closed.

Overall, swimming beaches around Puget Sound consistently get a clean bill of health. But Silver Lake is one of a handful of Puget Sound swimming areas that show signs of chronic pollution that could send swimmers home with a bad case of diarrhea. They include spots in King, Snohomish, Pierce, Whatcom and Kitsap counties.

A Seattle Times analysis of test results from 135 beaches in eight counties reveals that while most swimming beaches show little sign of problems, it's difficult to get complete and reliable information about bacteria levels at local beaches, due to inconsistent monitoring and lack of uniform standards from county to county.

Whether a swimming beach is declared unhealthful depends not only on what pollution is in the water, but which county it's in.

Check for closures or advisories

Saltwater beaches in any Washington county: www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/ts/WaterRec/beach/
default.htm

Island County: www.islandcounty.net/health/

King County: dnr.metrokc.gov/wlr/waterres/swimbeach/

Kitsap County: www.kitsapcountyhealth.com/environmenta
_health/water_quality/lakes_swimming.htm

Pierce County: www.tpchd.org/page.php?id=53

Skagit County: www.skagitcounty.net/health

Snohomish County: www.snohd.org/

Thurston County: www.co.thurston.wa.us/health/ehsb/
swimming-safety.html

Bellingham: www.cob.org

Whatcom County parks: www.whatcomcounty.us/parks/

Fluctuating water quality

Compared to some other parts of the country, swimmers around Puget Sound generally have it good.

Unlike Southern California's oceanside beaches, which are routinely closed because of pollution, most of Puget Sound's saltwater beaches don't have the high bacteria levels that mean people are at greater risk of getting sick from swallowing the water.

Sewage once fouled Lake Washington so badly that swimming there was like diving into a toilet. Today, most of its beaches show little sign of bacterial contamination.

The same is true for many freshwater swimming areas at lakes throughout the region.

But there are exceptions. And they share a common profile: They are in heavily developed areas. They have relatively stagnant water. And they get regular doses of urban runoff, which is laden with everything from motor oil to dog poop to human sewage.

Yet many of those locations are popular swimming spots, with expanses of attractive sand and little visible evidence of problems. Water quality at these beaches can fluctuate quickly, influenced by things such as rainstorms, so on any given day they may be clean. But they may also be polluted.

How we rated beaches

The Seattle Times rated Puget Sound-area beaches using guidelines issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for freshwater and saltwater beaches. The Times analyzed available state, county and city water-test results for 2001-04 and looked for beaches that showed signs of chronic bacterial pollution. The rankings are based on whether, over the four years, a beach:

• Repeatedly had bacteria levels over EPA limits.

• Was repeatedly closed to the public.

The Seattle Times analyzed data collected by state, county and city agencies over the past four years to look for evidence of repeated, longstanding problems. To learn the most current state of a beach, people should contact the local health district.

"It's like being Scrooge"

Renton's Gene Coulon Memorial Beach Park is a case study in chronic pollution problems.

On July 15 it renewed its status as one of Lake Washington's repeat offenders when county health officials closed the park to swimming for the second time in two years. They also closed Matthews Beach in Seattle.

Bacteria levels at Coulon had spiked to more than three times the limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Both beaches were reopened Friday when subsequent tests showed a drop in bacteria levels.

Tuesday, King County environmental scientist Marc Patten strapped on waders and strode into the lake on a hunt for the source of the problems at Coulon.

He filled bottles with water from the sandy swimming beach, which is enclosed from the rest of the lake by a concrete walkway. Then he moved on to John's Creek, a stagnant, algae-filled stream that flows into the lake just north of the beach, a possible source of the bacteria.

The beach, often packed with kids on weekends and sunny afternoons, was deserted. Signs staked at the water's edge admonished people: "Restricted Area, Keep Out." A lifeguard's voice boomed over a loudspeaker, chasing away a few kids sitting on a walkway and dangling their feet in the water.

"You don't want to close the beach on a day like today," said Jonathan Frodge, who heads the county's beach-testing program. As he watched Patten collect samples, he looked up at a cloudless sky.

"It's like being Scrooge."

Neighboring counties also have their problems with chronically tainted beaches.

In Pierce County, Tacoma parks officials recently closed Wapato Lake to swimming at the request of the county health department, because it has bacteria problems. Metro Parks Tacoma is now developing a plan to improve the area around the lake, including cleaning up the water.

Lake Spanaway, a more heavily used swimming area, has been posted with warnings three out of the last four years. The problem may stem from ducks and geese on the lake, said Skip Ferrucci, Piece County parks superintendent. But there aren't any projects to improve water quality there, he said.

In Kitsap County, sewage spills on Bremerton's northern flank shut beaches in Dyes Inlet and the Port Washington Narrows nearly every year. The city has spent more than $40 million since the early 1990s to try to fix the problems, after settling a lawsuit brought by an environmental watchdog group.

While spills still happen, the work has resulted in cutting the mess triggered when rainstorms overwhelm the sewage system. Last year 230,000 gallons of stormwater mixed with sewage were released; if changes hadn't been made, it could have been 80 million gallons, said Phil Williams, director of public works and utilities for Bremerton. While the spills still force closures, tests show little sign of high bacterial contamination.

Seeking a "state standard"

In Snohomish County, it's been years since a beach was closed to swimming. But that's not to say the water is unusually pristine.

In fact, a state study in 2004 found two lakes — Silver Lake and Lake Ballinger — with bacteria levels well above federal guidelines.

The county's health district stopped routine monitoring of swimming beaches in 1999 because the tests were too costly and provided little useful information, said Bob Pekich, director of environmental health for Snohomish County's health district.

"What does it tell you? I don't know," Pekich said of the problems with the tests. "We couldn't even find complete and standard information on what threshold to use."

Pekich said he wasn't aware of problems at the two lakes.

Pekich isn't alone in complaining about an absence of uniform standards. Decisions about swimming beaches are left almost entirely to local health districts. The state provides no money for testing, and little guidance. The state Department of Health is responsible for overseeing safety at swimming beaches, but delegates authority to local health agencies that conduct the monitoring and decide whether to close a beach.

Some counties, such as King and Kitsap, test beaches extensively. Others, such as Whatcom, Skagit and Thurston, do it infrequently. But counties follow their own individual rules on what bacteria levels warrant warnings.

Some counties, including King, close beaches based on levels of fecal coliform — a family of bacteria found in human and animal waste. However, the EPA considers that a less accurate gauge of risk to swimmers than testing for levels of E. coli, a subgroup of the fecal coliform group. The presence of E. coli is considered a better indicator of recent contamination and thus higher risk of illness.

The state Department of Health recommends counties choose between two sets of guidelines, one that uses fecal coliform and another that uses only E. coli. The state Department of Ecology uses still another set of water-quality standards, based on fecal coliform, to say whether a lake or beach is polluted.

"I think it would be good for us to get together and work something through and at least establish a state standard that could be used by everybody," said Gary Fraser, the state Department of Health's water-recreation program manager.

Much of the scattershot approach comes down to money, he said. Local health districts may not have the money to test beaches. If left to choose where to spend state money, Fraser said a more urgent need is getting more lifeguards at public beaches.

The latest effort to systematically monitor beach quality in Washington, an Ecology Department effort to test saltwater beaches, was launched as much because the EPA paid for it as it was because of health concerns.

The biggest problems in Washington are considered to involve freshwater beaches.

"We would have probably preferred to go in and look at a lot of water quality in the freshwater areas," Fraser said. "That, to me, was a higher priority. But there's not money federally for it, and there's no money state or locally for it."

Meanwhile, parents such as Troy Trent are left to wonder about their favorite beaches.

At Silver Lake, the only warning is a small, generic sign posted near the beach that says people can get sick while swimming in lakes and streams in general.

Trent doesn't think his daughters have ever gotten ill from swimming there. But he said he would like to know that someone is watching for problems.

"I feel like if it's not safe, I need to know that," he said.

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com