Besmirching the beach

Friday’s editorial:

Another year; another crummy, misleading report about the quality of our beaches.

The National Resources Defense Council claims that the purpose of “Testing the Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches” is to help us protect our most valuable asset, our beaches. But the fact that much of what the report penalizes our beaches for has little to do with their actual cleanliness inevitably turns discussion of the report into an exercise in shooting the messenger, and both the report’s impact - and eventually, the credibility of the environmentalists who author it - is diminished.

The report states that that Myrtle Beach’s shoreline is the dirtiest in the state. It gives us one star out of five, suggesting that a trip here should be a pretty dismal experience. After all, even the beaches in Chicago are rated much better.

But the report’s use of a five-star system is misleading. Most readers (especially tourists) will read it as similar to a restaurant or hotel review, a holistic appraisal of the venue’s offering. Yet, NRDC stars are more like check boxes - each one is awarded for fulfilling a specific objective.

Several of these categories have only tangential connection to the actual “dirtiness” of a beach. Three are for the presence of water-quality warnings (the one Myrtle Beach received), timeliness in reporting contamination and the frequency of water-quality testing. One beach is not cleaner or dirtier based on the absence or presence of a sign - but that’s exactly what the NRDC ratings would suggest. It’s as if a restaurant reviewer added or subtracted a star solely based on whether the establishment in question had a separate wine list.

The report does offer one measure with direct bearing on the quality of our beaches, the percentage of water-quality tests show contamination. In Myrtle Beach, that figure was 7 percent this year, far too high, a reflection that our beach ecosystem is a fragile one. Paved roads, driveways and parking lots line the length of it, and after a rain, the runoff from all those hard surfaces is swept across the beach and into the water.

This is no secret. It’s the reason for multi-million projects intended to carry stormwater deep into the ocean, well away from beachgoers. Are we making progress in this effort? Possibly - Myrtle Beach has cut the pollution rate in half from last year - but our rating has not changed.

Consider: among the worst offenders in the nation on this year’s list are a pair of points at California’s Doheny State Beach in Orange County, each of which showed contamination in nearly 40 percent of their samples - more than five times as bad as Myrtle Beach’s. Yet each are rated “three-star” beaches, based on their signage and other external factors. This pattern is repeated throughout this report.

Finally, stormwater is only one kind of pollution, and not necessarily the most dangerous. Other beaches are fouled by sewage, animal dung, boating waste, farm runoff and harmful algae blooms. A rating of the nation’s beaches as to their actual toxicity would be extremely useful to both travelers and to the residents of coastal communities. Yet the NRDC insists, year after year, on following a far easier, but far less valuable, path.

Last year, we noted the merit that one NRDC suggestion had - that South Carolina become quicker at notifying the public about bacteria in the water. That suggestion might not have gone unheeded if the report itself was more substantive.

Ratings are, by definition, intended to simplify. As a tool for comparison, or as a starting point for conversation, they can be extremely useful. But when a set of ratings is so overly simplistic as to be misleading, and when the authors repeatedly fail to heed substantive criticisms of their methodology, it’s probably better to regard them as a self-aggrandizing nuisance.

The National Resources Defense Council claims that the purpose of “Testing the Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches” is to help us protect our most valuable asset, our beaches. But the fact that much of what the report penalizes our beaches for has little to do with their actual cleanliness inevitably turns discussion of the report into an exercise in shooting the messenger, and both the report’s impact - and eventually, the credibility of the environmentalists who author it - is diminished.

The report states that that Myrtle Beach’s shoreline is the dirtiest in the state. It gives us one star out of five, suggesting that a trip here should be a pretty dismal experience. After all, even the beaches in Chicago are rated much better.

But the report’s use of a five-star system is misleading. Most readers (especially tourists) will read it as similar to a restaurant or hotel review, a holistic appraisal of the venue’s offering. Yet, NRDC stars are more like check boxes - each one is awarded for fulfilling a specific objective.

Several of these categories have only tangential connection to the actual “dirtiness” of a beach. Three are for the presence of water-quality warnings (the one Myrtle Beach received), timeliness in reporting contamination and the frequency of water-quality testing. One beach is not cleaner or dirtier based on the absence or presence of a sign - but that’s exactly what the NRDC ratings would suggest. It’s as if a restaurant reviewer added or subtracted a star solely based on whether the establishment in question had a separate wine list.

The report does offer one measure with direct bearing on the quality of our beaches, the percentage of water-quality tests show contamination. In Myrtle Beach, that figure was 7 percent this year, far too high, a reflection that our beach ecosystem is a fragile one. Paved roads, driveways and parking lots line the length of it, and after a rain, the runoff from all those hard surfaces is swept across the beach and into the water.

This is no secret. It’s the reason for multi-million projects intended to carry stormwater deep into the ocean, well away from beachgoers. Are we making progress in this effort? Possibly - Myrtle Beach has cut the pollution rate in half from last year - but our rating has not changed.

Consider: among the worst offenders in the nation on this year’s list are a pair of points at California’s Doheny State Beach in Orange County, each of which showed contamination in nearly 40 percent of their samples - more than five times as bad as Myrtle Beach’s. Yet each are rated “three-star” beaches, based on their signage and other external factors. This pattern is repeated throughout this report.

Finally, stormwater is only one kind of pollution, and not necessarily the most dangerous. Other beaches are fouled by sewage, animal dung, boating waste, farm runoff and harmful algae blooms. A rating of the nation’s beaches as to their actual toxicity would be extremely useful to both travelers and to the residents of coastal communities. Yet the NRDC insists, year after year, on following a far easier, but far less valuable, path.

Last year, we noted the merit that one NRDC suggestion had - that South Carolina become quicker at notifying the public about bacteria in the water. That suggestion might not have gone unheeded if the report itself was more substantive.

Ratings are, by definition, intended to simplify. As a tool for comparison, or as a starting point for conversation, they can be extremely useful. But when a set of ratings is so overly simplistic as to be misleading, and when the authors repeatedly fail to heed substantive criticisms of their methodology, it’s probably better to regard them as a self-aggrandizing nuisance.