Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

The regulations and policies concerning beach closure set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency and Connecticut Department of Public Health are inadequate in protecting public health. Under current conditions, contaminated beaches are left open to the public for extended periods of time. Current laboratory testing procedures take approximately 24 hours to be returned after the sample reaches the lab and the assay is set up. However, studies show that establishing beach closure on previous-day bacteria tests is accurate only 33% of the time—worse than at random (Morrison, 2003). Moreover, local CT health departments test water quality only once a week—most often on Mondays. This suggests that local health departments do not have the necessary information to determine whether their beaches are contaminated closer to the weekend, the most popular beach bathing days. Though these procedures are useful in evaluating the overall trend of a beach’s water quality or detecting a significant contamination event, they are unhelpful for day to day safety. Therefore, new policies and procedures are needed to better protect public health and better determine when beaches are contaminated. This is especially true given recent climate change trends. The increased likelihood of changing and more severe weather patterns have raised the possibility that this threat will be magnified in the future.It is expected that climate change will likely increase the presence of bacterial contamination due to changing environmental factors such as increases in temperature, sea level, extreme precipitation, and other extreme weather events.