Long Island beach closures: 22 were off limits to swimmers for 14 days or more in 2023

With a skate park, soccer fields, pickleball courts and fishing piers, the 93-acre Tanner Park on the waterfront in Copiague is a hub of recreational activity.

Taking a dip at its beach, however, is never a sure thing. People have been barred or advised against swimming at Tanner Park for more than 400 days over the last decade — more than any other beach on Long Island — due to bacterial contamination or heavy rains that could lead to poor water quality.

“It’s pretty much dirty all the time,” Bill Bura, 73, of Amityville, said earlier this month as he left the nearby boccie club. He used to swim at the beach as a kid, when he remembers the water “was a lot cleaner.”

“There’s a lot of debris in the water,” he added. “It's depressing for the kids — there’s a lot who don’t have pools.”

Newsday examined water quality testing across Long Island over the past decade to determine how often beaches were closed or advised to close for swimming, and the reasons why. Newsday also followed Suffolk County Health Department workers while they collected samples and tested them at the lab, a daily practice during the summer season.

While most beaches remain open through nearly all of the season, others are chronically plagued with high bacteria counts that make it unsafe to enter the water, keeping beachgoers from one of the Island’s most important resources. Even more often, health officials advise people against swimming at beaches with a history of bacterial contamination after a heavy rainfall.

Last summer, Tanner was one of 22 beaches on Long Island where swimming was off limits or not recommended for 14 days or more due to bacterial contamination or a rain advisory, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. The park had 30 such days, followed by Morgan Memorial Beach in Glen Cove with 20; Tides Property Owners Association and Beech Road Beach, both in Rocky Point, with 19 and 17, respectively; and Knollwood Beach in Huntington and Hewlett Beach in East Rockaway each with 17.

A look back over 10 years shows swimming at Tanner was off limits or not recommended for 410 days; Biltmore Beach in Massapequa for 268 days; Benjamin’s Memorial Beach in Bay Shore for 253 days; Philip Healey Beach in Massapequa for 224 days; and Valley Grove Beach in Eatons Neck for 220.

The list also included Crescent Beach in Glen Cove, which has not been open for swimming in 10 years. It is undergoing a project to manage bacterial contamination coming from an adjacent stream, at least partly caused by failing septic systems.

The EPA data does not include 2024. But the Suffolk County Health Department said Friday that this summer it had issued 15 water quality closures due to an excess of Enterococci and E. coli and six rain advisories, with up to 63 beaches affected.

The Nassau Health Department has issued eight advisories due to rainfall, with up to 18 beaches affected, and one beach closed so far this season.

Heavier rainfalls pushing waste to water

Some municipalities have undertaken projects to better filter or redirect stormwater in an effort to reduce the waste and debris from entering Long Island Sound, the Great South Bay and other bodies of water in Nassau and Suffolk counties. But experts say a large part of the problem is also geography and the weather, with heavier rainfalls that scientists attribute to climate change.

“Our rainfall patterns are changing on Long Island,” said Christopher Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and chair of Coastal Ecology and Conservation there. “Specifically, we're getting events where there's just more volume happening all at once, and that translates to important implications for our coastal waters.”

Gobler said an inch or more of rain results in a large pulse of freshwater, pushing waste from land into coastal waters that leads to high levels of fecal bacteria.

“When you have beaches that are right behind neighborhoods and lots of that runoff, those are the areas that are going to be vulnerable,” he said.

The beach at Tanner Park, located at the tip of Copiague, faces the Great South Bay, with Jones Beach Island separating it from the Atlantic Ocean. Gobler said tidal flushing is very sluggish around the South Shore bays, such as south Oyster Bay, Shinnecock Bay and the Great South Bay, and the water does not get moved around as much as in other places.

During storms that dump more than an inch of rain, “Lawn chemicals, pet waste and animal waste from wild animals — all of that now is going to get washed into the drains,” said Brian Zitani, waterways management supervisor for Babylon Town. “Anything south of Montauk Highway is going to be dumped into one of the creeks or canals and … it ends up in the bay.”

Zitani said the frequent closures at Tanner Park are frustrating for the parks department. “They’re interested in as many operating days as possible during the summer season,” he said, but, “The options, quite honestly, are somewhat limited.”

South Shore towns, including Copiague, are densely settled and low-lying, with a high water table. That rules out use of retention ponds that capture stormwater and use wetland plants and the soil to filter the water. Other engineering solutions, like filters in the storm drain system, are costly and high maintenance, Zitani said.

“The closer you get to the bay, you’re severely limited as to what you can actually do,” he said.

Causing rashes, gastrointestinal problems

Sterilized bottle in hand, Nancy Pierson waded slowly into the placid waters off Callahans Beach in Fort Salonga. She dipped her arm into the surf and carefully scooped water into the bottle.

Pierson, an associate public health sanitarian with the Suffolk County Department of Health’s Office of Ecology, packed the sample in ice and drove it to the agency’s lab in Hauppauge, where it will be tested for enterococcus bacteria, an indicator organism for fecal contamination and the presence of disease-causing organisms in the water.

This process is repeated dozens of times a day across Suffolk County as part of the Health Department’s beach water quality program.

“This is important because this is what we do during summer on Long Island, we go into the water,” Suffolk County Health Commissioner Dr. Gregson H. Pigott said. “You really want to know, ‘Is this water safe for me to swim in?’ ”

Saltwater bodies are tested for enterococcus bacteria, and freshwater bodies, such as Lake Ronkonkoma, are tested for E. coli bacteria.

People, especially children or the elderly who swim in waters with high concentrations of bacterial contamination, can experience several health issues if they come in contact with the contaminated water, ranging from a rash to gastrointestinal problems like diarrhea and vomiting.

If the sample has high concentrations of the indicator bacteria, the beach is closed to swimming, according to state Health Department standards.

While the EPA recommends lower levels than New York uses for “enhanced protection,” state Health Department officials said there has not been significant illness associated with beach water that would suggest the need for a lower threshold to protect public health. There have not been reports of gastrointestinal illness outbreaks associated with a beach since 2005, the health department said in a statement.

Testing at the Suffolk County Public and Environmental Health Lab takes place seven days a week during the summer season. Results are ready in about 24 hours, Pierson said, and then she examines them to determine whether a beach can remain open or needs to be closed or retested.

Beth Essex, the senior bacteriologist at the lab, said she and other scientists take their work seriously and personally.

“These are our beaches, too,” she said.

Pierson, who oversees the sample collection program, said they monitor 190 beaches in Suffolk, from those on Long Island Sound to the Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Some are sampled two or three times a week.

“One individual will get about 13 to 15 beaches a day, so if I have four people out, 50 to 60 samples will go back to the lab per day,” she said.

No flushing of contamination

Fecal contamination comes from several sources, she said, including waste from people, dogs and even birds, failing septic systems and illegal discharge from boats. During heavy rains, stormwater runoff, containing all kinds of organic waste and debris, can wash into the waterways.

“If you’re in a cove where there isn’t a lot of flushing of the water, a lot of interchange between the tides, you get some stagnation,” she said. “If you get a lot of high seaweed counts, the seaweed can grow the bacteria. In lakes where they don't monitor and clean up geese droppings, you can have a high bacteria count for that as well.”

Closed beaches are retested the next morning and if that result comes back clean within 24 hours, the site can be reopened, she said.

The Nassau County Health Department conducts both sampling and analysis of water at 63 bathing beaches. Samples are collected up to three times a week and analyzed at its public health laboratory.

When heavy rains are expected, health officials in Nassau and Suffolk counties issue advisories for beaches that have a historical issue with stormwater runoff.

Smithtown's $2.3M reconstruction

Preventing bacteria from getting into bathing beaches can be as simple as picking up after your dog and as complex as creating new systems to handle stormwater discharge. Smithtown and Southampton Village both recently completed projects they believe will cut back on contamination.

Heavy storms in 2021 destroyed the stairs leading down the bluff to Callahan’s Beach in Smithtown. The $2.3 million reconstruction project gave Smithtown officials an opportunity to create a sturdy, storm-resistant site and drainage system that would prevent waves from crashing into the bluff and storm runoff from carrying debris into Long Island Sound.

“There are layers of protection using natural elements and natural systems,” said David Barnes, director of environmental protection for Smithtown, including a reinforced steel wall coated with an anti-corrosive substance, piles of boulders, native beach grass and plantings, as well as natural fiber “log rolls,” which are filled with straw, flax, rice and other materials and sometimes wrapped in burlap or jute.

“We added drainage in the parking lot and we reconstructed the whole drainage system,” Barnes said. “We included something called a vortex system … It spins the rainwater and then it settles out all the litter and the other pollutants.”

Southampton Village bioswales

In Southampton Village, workers have built a series of bioswales — shallow landscaped ditches that collect and filter rainwater — over the past four years to clean water moving toward Agawam Lake to the south. That 60-acre body of water is a 10th of a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, and when the lake levels rise high, engineers drain it into the ocean to reduce flooding in local basements.

The village’s work has not come cheap, though Mayor William Granger Jr. said much of it has been grant funded. Resurfacing of the West Main Street parking lot and construction of four bioswales there cost $800,000.

This fall, the village will install an algae harvester in the lake to process 3 million gallons of water every day. The $10 million price tag is covered by federal and Southampton Town grants.

“The overarching environmental trend is more rainfall, which could be delivering more bacteria,” Gobler said. “But there's that hope that if efforts are made to divert stormwater, the water gets better and areas become cleaner.”

With Nicolas Villamil