Palos Verdes Beaches On 2021 Honor Roll List Again!
Palos Verdes home owners are lucky to have some of the cleanest beaches in California for our families to enjoy. At the beginning of the year, some of the local beaches were closed due to covid restrictions. We are grateful that our beaches have been open the entire summer.
Every year the beach water is reported through the Heal the Bay reporting system. Once again Heal the Bay has reported that Palos Verdes beaches and coves are in the current top Honor Roll 2020-2021 list for California. This means that our local waters have received grades of A & A+ during the summer dry part of the year. Because of the wet weather this year, one of our beaches received a B report because of trail outlets. However, year round wet weather averages went back up. Heal the Bay assigns weekly grades to more than 500 sites along the West Coast for summer dry-weather water quality and to another 65 locations that are on year round monitoring. Heal the Bay is a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to making Southern California coastal waters and watersheds safe, healthy and clean. They use science, education, community action and advocacy to pursue their mission. Mexico has also joined the monitoring with three of their beaches located in Tijuana. They are El Faro, El Vigia & Playa Blanca.
Heal the Bay published their first Beach Report Card in 1990 and covered about 60 locations in Los Angeles County. At that time, beach goers knew little about the health risks of the water around them. Since that time, there has been a great deal more information to help keep pollution and sewage spills off our local beaches.
The Beach Report Card (BRC) is based on the routine monitoring of beaches by local health agencies. They collect water samples checking for bacteria that indicate pollution. The better the grade on the beach means the lower the risk of illness to beach goers.
The Beach Report Card program is funded from grants from different foundations. Volunteer groups such as Nothing But Sand, and Coastal Clean Ups are constantly needed to help ensure this program continues to minimize the pollution of our beaches. This year, because of the Coronavirus, many of the local Coastal Volunteer Days were cancelled. However, at this time, the Coastal Cleanup Month is September, and on Saturday, September 18, 2021, participants can help by volunteering from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon. If you are interested in participating in Heal the Bay’s event, click here. Our local organizations such as Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy and Los Serenos de Point Vicente offer residents additional opportunities to help clean our local beaches. Funding is always welcome to help Heal the Bay pay for the monitoring of our beautiful beaches.
To read more about Heal the Bay’s Beach Report Card program click here.
To read my prior article on Heal the Bay beach report card click here.
Photo courtesy of Heal the Bay
