meaningless or meaningful data collection

over the 32 plus years at the Stamford health Department, i have sought to make my data collection meaningful.
It has been used to shape policy, locally, statewide and nationally.
To me this was what data is for, to make observations, come to conclusions and make action.
Being in public health, i believe it has prevented some people from becoming ill.
We do work for many other entities and i had a conversation (via email) with one of theses the other day that made my hair stand on end.
It was concerning beach testing - they had not brought sample to me on a day they seemed to specify and i innocently asked why.  The following response was what i got:

"I had no intention of closing the beaches regardless of the test results, hence there was no reason to test. I am planning on sampling today."

This from a health Director who's job it is to protect the public's health.

I asked why test at all and the response was "that it was good data collection."

I can not say anything more to this

perigee tide issues

Last year in Sepatember there was a perigee tide that i had not seen previously and the predicted tide hieght was greater than 9.3 feet.
We had samples beaches just as the tide was ebbing and found high bacteria counts.
Now this was something that i had expected with other high tides, but not found in much significants and so this was the first and only perigee tide that i had found what was suspected.
There were no duplications of the tide or of the results.
The high tide this year occured past midnight and sampling was done at incoming tide after the low.
There was nothing, no bacteria.
The situation remains unproven, but it also begs the question on how long such an effect might last?
The rainfall issue (washing bacteria into the Sound) was carefully studied and we discovered that 24 hours was always enough, but 12 hours was not enough.
This tide will not be repeated anytime soon (at least till after 2013 is over) and i will not be the one to find the issues and the particulars.

Beach meeting fall 2011

Twice a year, the state of Ct and local health and the US EPA get together to discuss the beach monitoring program in CT.
This year we had an additional bonaus, a review of the latest National beach confrence, which discussed information on direction of the national program.
A quick synopsis:
Heavy on epidemilogical studies - mostly discounting the improvement of PCR techniques.
Heavy on relating illness to what ever source might be out there - human and animal.
Strong encoragement on pre-emptive beach closures (which Stamfrd has been using since 1989).
Strong associasion of illness, current indicator bacteria and illness in Urban run off settings (again the kind Stamford has).
I actually felt a bitvindicating since my work comes under fire often from the public, the political machine and some  times surperiors.
It was a good meeting.

perigee tides

The  really high ones, i mean.  We just had one at the end of September and in my records (which come from NOAA) and by observations by long time fishermen, it was the highest, non-storm perigee tide we have seen.  The NOAA tide records seem to say the same with another one coming at the end of October.
Why the big deal?
We finished our final, close out beach sampling during the peak of one of those tides and the numbers were astronomical (bacteria wise).  This is something that is in my sights as far as predictive modeling - washing out storm drains by high tides.
This was the highest we have seen and the only one which indicates it might b real.
We will be vigilant for future perigee tides.

Research Salinity

I often look at things, try to see if i have a good idea and then test it...this is such research, which ended up with me rejecting the use of salinity as a quick way of figuring out what might go wrong at Stamfords beaches....
There was something that i did find out that is useful, there has been some ideas that there is a large influx of fresh water going into the sound from "Ground water" as oposed to surface water. A quality control sample taked 1 mile off the Stamford shore line had no more salinity than the normal levels found at the beaches. Does not seem to be the case.
This also shows that no matter what test you might use, if you know your shoreline and what affects it, history and action because of that knowledg,e is far faster than any test.

Salinity– a tool without promise and not as quick as a preemptive closure

Abstract

Over the course of several years, the Stamford health Department Lab has been doing additional work on all Long Island Sound recreational waters. Besides the traditional bacteriological tests, various chemical parameters have been measured, pH salinity, chloride, nitrite and turbidity. While all have had some promising results and most had drawbacks, salinity showed the best correlation, in Stamford, with bacterial levels. The one very simple statement that can be made is that salinity gave us information we already knew. When fresh water intruded into the beach water, from rain that was significant enough to cause a significant decrease in the salinity, the beaches were already closed by a policy of preemptive closure due to a measured amount of rain. Small variances (± 0.5%) in salinity did not indicate more than normal tidal flow and were not useful in determining bacteriological quality, but could help in understanding currents along the shore.

Sampling Discussion

Since August of 2010, the Stamford Health Department has been analyzing all recreational beach water taken for enterococcus bacteriological quality for salinity also. This is only 195 samples for the Stamford recreational beaches, but does include samples taken at various tides and weather conditions. This is obviously not as large a sample set as our predictive model, based on rainfall amounts, which used over 8,000 samples to confirm its efficacy, however for Stamford, we can make conclusions even on this small sample set.

Previously, we attempted to use chloride measurement (using an US EPA titration method), however because dilutions needed to be great, large errors were introduced into the results and this data was not used.
Small variances (< 0.10%) between samples of each sample set were understood when comparing to known fresh water influences and the currents based on tides.

Instrumentation, Standards and Method

Oakton SALT 6 Acorn series battery operated Salinity meter

Salinity standards 3.5 % and 1.65%
Used in the laboratory only – though this is a portable model
Internal quality control check when turned on
Standardized with use at 0.165% and 3.5% initially
One standard reevaluated at 10 samples and at the end of the series
A sample was analyzed in duplicate for each set
A known amount of sample was added to perform a standard addition evaluation
Duplicate samples were taken and evaluated for each sample set
A sample set was taken from 1 mile off shore at Buoy 38 to ascertain if there is a “plume” of ground water influencing the salinity of bathing water
Temperatures were recorded before each sample set reading
Rain is recorded for each sample set

Quality Control

The low standard (0.165) average recovery was 102.33% with a minimum of 97.56% and maximum of 109.76%

The high standard (3.5) average recovery was 99.13% with a minimum of 93.71% and maximum of 100.29%
The standard addition average recovery was 99.32% with a minimum of 97.97% and maximum of 100.00%
Duplicate reading of the same sample had a comparison average of 100.26% with the minimum of 98.93% and a maximum of 101.65%
The end standard average recovery was 100.52% with a minimum of 98.57% and a maximum of 112.50%
Duplicate samples had an average difference of -0.01 with a standard deviation of 0.01
Samples from 1 mile off shore had % salinities of 2.84, 2.89, 2.88 and 2.89 which is a difference of less than 0.3 from the onshore average
Temperatures were in the range of 21 to 26 C during the readings

Results

8 samples had enterococcus levels greater than 104 CFUs/100 mL. Salinity measurements were below average in 3 of those samples. A rain event greater than one inch was recorded for 7 of the samples and the other sample had a rain event greater than 2”, two days previous and is near a storm drain. The salinity did not indicate a problem with fresh storm water intrusion at that sample, but previous testing had showed this particular sample location was prone to bacterial elevations 2 days after a rain event greater than one inch.

Conclusions

Not only was salinity not a good indicator of bacterial elevations more than 50% of the time, rain measurements had already closed the beach water for swimming before the samples were taken, making the identification of the problem using salinity pointless.

NRDC reports on beaches

There are many things that one can say on these yearly reports and i find much of my attitude toward them as "they still do not really understand at all".
Why?
While they do provide open discussion about the quality of swimming water in America and do raise awareness of what we have done to our planet (not that it would matter much if we were suddenly gone, the planet would heal itself), but they have missed balance.
Balance?  What does that have to do with anything?
If you believe the ideas and myths presented of the "American Indian" and how they lived in harmony with nature (not totally in reality, but better than we), there is to be harmony and balance between man and nature.
The NRDC and the US EPA are "clean water" agencies and that means they would be very happy if all the water in the world was without any materials of any kind other than water.
That, to me, would mean sterile water with no life
Why?
The reality is that water carries with it normal things from the land to water that provides life for the tiniest organisms which allow other organisms to feed and the cycle goes upward.
Man partakes of this food chain at thew higher levels and so must put back a proportional amount to balance the equation.
Of course we have not done this.
We have put things in there to kill things we do not like (pesticides and other poisons).  We have put things from the manufacture of items to kill our selves (lead and mercury).  We even have  put all of our waste, with out any sorting of good from bad, in the same waters.
So the organisms the US EPA is worried about and uses to monitor water quality are organisms that are common to humans, enterococcus and fecal coliform, but they have many, many natural sources as well and are part of the cycle of life.
They also are linked to human illness.
So when a town like Stamford, closes its beaches after a heavy rain, it is not because of man-made pollution, it is because the normal cycle of washing the earth has brought these organisms into the water for a time.  It will eventually increase  aquatics life and bathers are inconvenienced for a day.
This of course is not what the US EPA nor the NRDC wants, they want no beach closures ever and i think it is rather selfish of us to think this way.

Learning

Approaching a new idea is not always an easy road and there are many pitfalls. So it is with my understanding of what pH and chloride levels mean in the water.
I already have maybe 40 or so samples in a week and I think I am seeing patterns of flow from the results.
I will keep looking and see what shows.

Something simple?

I get "Eureka" moments when I am in the lab.
What it usually entails is more work for me to figure if something is valid or not.
Fortunately, I have the samples coming in.
It has to do with something simple. It has to do a connection I need to prove.
The first step is to show that it will work for Stamford, CT. It does not have to work any place else.
The second is to verify many times that pH and salinity are related.
The third will be to show a correlation between pH and bacteria.
This is based on the fact (already proven many times in 30 years) that all of the elevate bacteria levels come from fresh water sources.
I already have one fact, all fresh water sources have a pH more acid than the Sound.
If I can show this correlation, someone will be able to go down to the beach and determine is the water is being affected by enough fresh water to initiate a closing.
There is no waiting period for the reading, it is instantaneous. If this works, it will be far better than anything anyone has thought of.
Will it work?
I have to test this theory to find out.

Beaches, Beach Closings and why Stamford does it

An article in the New Haven Advocate had me bemused. New Haven does not close the beaches when they have high bacteria levels.
They have not figured out that it is better to protect the public's health (and what then is a Health Deaprtment?), than sit on their hands and do nothing. They feel the data comes late and so is not valid.
I figured some of it out over 20 years ago. I did the testing and saw a pattern. Rain caused an elevation in bacteria at the bathing beaches.
We figured (We had a very proactive Health Director then and was very supportive) it was better to close a beach before we had proof positive that it would cause trouble (the bacteria tests) than to let people get sick.
In 1988, we had many reports of illness from people who ignored our warnings when we put up signs saying it might not be a good idea that they swim. The next year, we were more forceful about it and because many remembered the year before, they stayed out of the water.
We were also sure this was not sewage. We did know when there was a sewage problem and that was easy to close down areas affected, but this was not.
After a year of exhaustive testing, we found out it was the storm water.
We first thought it was all the raccoons that were living in the storm drains, but in 1990, rabies came and dropped the raccoon population 95%. The water was not as bad, but it would still close the beach for bathing.
The reality, we are an urban environment, water washing over the land and into the Sound did not get treated naturally, it was piped directly to the Sound. It was not "bad" water, but while it was coming out, we needed people to stay out of the water. It only took 24 hours till it was no longer in the water. We asked why and other people, part of the USGS, figured it would go into the sand and lie there waiting to be distrurbed, but unless there was an additional "load", it would not reach health concern levels.
We looked every year at the data, learned new things, saw new patterns, learned a lot. The marine police, the lifeguards, the recreation department all could observe things and help us out. It worked. People do not report being sick from swimming in the water at the beaches. They all lnow that you do not swim after a heavy rain. They even figured it would affect the fresh water lakes and ponds, People are smart, they need to be informed and they need to be protested. Since is my part.
Whats wrong with New Haven?

Beaches

How long have I studied Stamford water quality at the beaches? 30 years? May be, but I really got down and dirty with it 20 years ago. This is the run off from all the rain cleaning urban streets and storm systems and hopefully providing food for creatures to eat because out there in the Sound a mile out there is nothing!
The unsettled weather, the 3 inch rain and the other thunder storms all around us has cause the water to have a lot of unusual bacteria organisms, none over limit to allow me to close them, but I would tell you to be careful going into the water. Wash off after.
We have not seen that mystical white Styrofoam type stuff, "Sewage grease" that I believed would be there from the 3 inch rain, but the weather has been very unsettled and may have broken it all apart in the near waters.
The next four or five days promise to be nice weather and that maybe enough to settle every thing down.
From the info I get from beach net, the indicator bacteria (and a pathogen in its own right) will come out of wet sand during this unsettled weather. it has not been numbers I worry greatly about and certainly not in numbers that would allow me to shut down bathing on a Fourth of July weekend, but caution is urged.

Stamford Beaches

Over the last 30 years of working at the lab in the Health Department, we have done some fairly major work on Stamford's beaches. It was significant enough that the research will be published in August the Journal of Environmental Health as the feature article.
So why is that the Parks and recreation department decided to extend West beach to the south with out doing appropriate water sampling? I do not know, but we are fortunate, we had a half inch of rain and we sampled the next day and that spot was not a good one. I had my doubts, but the couple of non-rain samples showed okay and I just waited.
The beach is adjacent an old, but very affluent section of Stamford known as Shippan. The mayor lives there. There are many other wealthy Stamfordites who live there. The infrastructure (meaning the sewer pipes especially) are old. The area was not part of "Operation Shellfish" in 1987, which basically went through every pipe and connection in the Cove area to see if there were any improper connections. It probably should have been.
That nice new part of West beach is now NOT open for bathing until we find out why the results were off and I think Shippan may be the key.

The State Beach meeting

Some items of importance were discussed:
New legislation in the house and senate, desires to develop quick testing methods, geese population and control, employment and service cuts in the state lab.

The new legislation is to extend/revive the Bract act of 2003 (?) and contains additional funds and expansions and maybe some punitive actions.
The additional funds may be a joke since of the $30 Million called for in the current act, only $10 million is appropriated.
The expansions are talking about developing new quick test methods and may be giving money to find out why and where high levels of bacteria come from.
The punitive actions are to cut funding if states do not meet the goal.
Quick testing methods are desired to be 2 hour turn around time, but are really very expensive (and there is no help with the cost of use).
A presentation from the fish and wildlife management division of CT was on Geese, everything you ever thought you wanted to know and more.
Population, areas of high concentrations, human attitudes toward them and possible control.
There was a clear statement that NO research has shown a link between human illness and geese feces.
It was also clear that Urban areas have had their fill of geese in the parks.
Stamford was one of 7 towns that DID NOT fill out a survey concerning attitudes and population from this Department in 2003.
It was also clear that the only real way to get rid of the resident population of geese (not migratory), was to kill them.
Stamford may get more work, the state can not hire the couriers as of this date for sample pick up. We are one of the few labs outside of the state, equipped to do the testing. Darien uses us. Fairfield has used us. Driving to Stamford is easier than driving to Hartford for any one west of Fairfield.
The state water quality lab lost one person to budget cuts and may have furlough days also.
Stamford still stands out in the state as far as data collection and knowledge of what goes on at its shores.

Beach Meeting

Every year about this time the State of Connecticut hosts its annual beach conference.
This is basically a meeting of all the coastal towns and a few inland where there are public lakes to discuss what is new, how the state testing will proceed and it can be somewhat boring.
The issue has been that since the US EPA gives states money for testing, the state will pick up samples from localities who want them tested for free, but there is a catch.
We in the lower Fairfield county would have to get the samples some significant distance to get picked up and if we wanted to have a re-sample we would have to get the samples to Hartford.
So much for free, this is one of the reasons that we have our own lab in Stamford. the other, well now there is NO private lab in the immediate area for any water testing. The closest is in Norwalk. try getting a sample there within 145 minutes of collection!
On to the subject tho. the meeting also describes methods, actions and directions for the beach testing program. We in Stamford have been at it longer than most, 35 plus years. I have been involved 30 years, since I started working with Stamford.
The US EPA will be there listening and sharing wisdom of how they want NO beach closings.
Having figured out long ago that this was impossible if you wanted to protest public health, I have been relieved as of late that the US GS and the Great Lakes beach watch program has fairly much figured out the same thing.
They have gone to great lengths to prove that the bacteria we look for is very naturally present in the environment and it my not have anything to do with sewage.
The portions that is interesting is that it is still the organism that can get us sick.
They have found that people bring it with them into the water, that the bacteria survives well in wet beach sand, that geese, gulls any any other shore bird can bring it into the water, it gets increased with rain and strong winds will raise the levels also.
None of this is surprising to me and does prove some of my own testing, but we are talking about natural water that is a shared resource with animals and fish. this is not a pool, clean and hopefully disinfected properly. This is what we should expect.

Predictive closures

Back to items I really know.
After work 20 years perfecting Stamford's policy of closing the beaches when conditions say that there is a good chance that there will be bacteria type problems in the recreational water, I became a bit defensive when I challenged the State's person in regards his take on this.
There is legislation in the US House to increase funding for testing (it will go to state agencies only) and require the development of rapid (2 hour) testing.
The portion I find laughable is that more or faster testing does not mean a great deal to me.
The example is when we were trying to understand problems that occurred at Cummings' beach and did time/tide/location studies.
We took a lot of samples.
They varied tremendously over all of the parameters. the sample sites were only about 10 feet apart.
This taught me a great lesson, bacteria are very different than chemicals and this was in 1988.
They clump together, they grow, they separate, they get eaten, they die.
The best I could do for my little 100 mL samples was get a hint of the activity beneath the waves.
So we began keeping very good records.
We tracked tides, rainfall, wind, temperature, bather load and other issues and slowly over thousands of samples we began to see things.
We established our bathing prohibitions based mostly on what was known from testing shellfish water, that rain will wash bacteria into the water, where it will live for a recordable time.
We knew this was not sewage, just normal bacteria that lives in everyday soil from every animal population that exists.
We figured that it lived in wet sand, but not dry. It seemed to exist in the water for at most 24 hours, then it was gone.
When you go to the beaches in Stamford after a heavy rain, there will be no bathing permitted. Enjoy the sand, the sun, but not the water until the next day.
We spent a lot of time trying to make sure you do not get sick from something that should be enjoyable.

Beach Closings

I will be away for an extended period of time on a medical issue (no, not psychiatric!), but my last post ( I think) before this will be on beach closings.
It took me over 20 years to develop the current preemptive bathing closure policy and its primary purpose to protect everyone from getting sick.
In 1987, when we started realizing the issues of rain and runoff from storms, we were closing after we finished testing the the water, which was 24 hours after the problem existed, mid -1987 we began closing when it seemed that the results would indicate a problem, but we were not so clear in to the reasons why.
People went into the water any way.
Then we started getting supportive calls back to the HD, that we should have listen to you, my son or daughter got an ear infection, or was throwing up or got a strange rash or I didn't feel so well...
People listen after that for awhile.
Well, most times after one of these heavy rains, the weather is not good for going out to the beach, last weekend was an exception, Sunday after that almost 2 inch rainfall, it was absolutely beautiful and bathing was prohibited from Saturday until 1:00 Pm Sunday afternoon and I heard that people did not treat the lifeguards well when they tried to warn people about the water.
Please, this is only cause we don't want you to get sick!
We want a trip to the beach to be an enjoyable experience, not one that sends you to the doctor!
We actually post advisories when there are jelly fish or swimmer itch occurs, but close when we think things could get serious, so the idea is to listen.
In this respect we don't care about NRDC ratings, we only care about your health!

Another Dose of reality...Geese in the Water

Quick, tell me how many water fowl live on Holly Pond? 100?, 200?, maybe as many as 500?
Counting all the geese, ducks, swan, and other shore birds, I have been given counts that range between 150 to 500, so what does this have to do with a dose of reality?
No one likes geese in their parks, but besides the long green things they lay down in the grass, everyone likes to blame the geese for bad water quality at the beach, but I have not found that to be true. As a matter of fact, one of our esteemed environmental activist (Art Glowka, head of Stamford's shellfish commission, who many people roll their eyes when they hear his name and I won't get into that yet) took samples at Holly Pond. Two from where Smokey Joe's is (before the bird life), two at the little park where everyone feeds the birds (mid pond) and two at the outflow. We both noted that Holly Pond is filled with sea grass. The highest values for bacteria were at Smoky Joe's, this coming from various septic and urban issues up the Noroton River on both sides (Darien and Stamford). pH and phosphate increased at mid pond, but the bacteria levels were way down (we assume that the weeds are doing an excellent job here) and everything goes down to just about nothing a the dam. Of course the bacteria we are looking at tells us the geese don't contribute much of anything, and I can prove that with previous samples from Holly Pond and elsewhere. Of course when it rain for a short time the sea grass can't handle the increased flow and things was out (which is why we close for 24 hours), but it isn't the geese that are the problem.
I will take a short break (again5 days) before getting into some of this wonderful stuff.

Back to Being Technical - or how nice our beaches are

So I go back to the lab scene, because the weather is so nice and the newspapers are calling because they have to have a distraction from all the oil news. Of course, it isn't proper that I talk to reporters directly without them going through proper channels, which they don't ever seem to want to take the time to do, so here is the simple story in all its technical detail.
The City of Stamford has, since 1989, closed its beaches after heavy rains of 1 or more inches for 24 hours. We did this, not because of sewage come from the treatment plant (which is actually very well run and really hasn't had any significant problems in a very, very, very long time), but because Stamford (surprise, surprise), is very developed along the shore for several miles in and something called urban run-off and we have an intricate and complete set of storm drains which moves all that water from a storm directly to the Sound, without any treatment. Now back in 1989, the storm drains themselves were home to a huge population of raccoons, which added to the problem (this changed in 1991 when rabies crossed the Hudson River and decreased the population by 95%), but the problem is still we are too developed and all the stuff on the concrete and sidewalks gets washed down (I am not talking about dog poo, just everything that has bacteria).
To do this was a lot of work (trust me, I did most of it) and we were not trying to predict how much the bacteria levels would rise, just that the chance that they would be over the safe health limits for swimmers was fairly high after an inch of rain. Additionally, we found out that the natural course of things cleared it all out after 20 hours plus or minus 4 hours, so they stay closed for 24.
Now after 20 years of having this in place, everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon and trying to do this predictive modeling and figure out why it is happening.
They are finding that this bacteria we test for lives in the sand (yeah, we did that also) and the increased wave action from the storm will elevate it.
They described what urban run-off was and all the other things that we did back then are all about, so now its big news.
And what do the papers want to know? How often we have been closed this year.
Twice - we have had 2 heavy rains and the beaches were closed twice.
Having said that, everyone should know that the water for 2 weeks has been beautiful, very clear and so little bacteria that you could almost drink it, but don't.