A photo made the rounds Friday of Revere Beach with the water an unappealing brown, and the question under it was the obvious one: is that safe to swim in? The honest answer is that nobody is checking anymore. The state’s testing season at Revere Beach ended September 1, the lifeguards left on Labor Day, and the designated swimming area officially closed the same day. From here to next May, the beach is open, unguarded and unsampled.
What the summer looked like
For the season that just ended, Revere Beach was in good shape. Save the Harbor/Save the Bay’s annual report card, released in June, gave it a 95 percent safe-swimming score for the prior year, which put it among the cleaner urban beaches in the harbor. “It is gratifying to once again see so many of our spectacular urban beaches consistently testing at safe bacteria levels,” the group’s director, Chris Mancini, said at the time. The state sampled the beach weekly at the State Police station from late May through September 1. No advisory was posted in the final week of testing that we could find.
Brown water is not, by itself, a sign of sewage. After a stretch of onshore wind and surf, the water at a shallow beach churns up sand and sediment and looks like weak coffee for a day or two. The Atlantic off Revere is doing that most of September. What actually raises bacteria counts is rain. Heavy rain washes the streets, the parking lots and the storm drains into the water, and in parts of the harbor it still overwhelms combined sewers. That is why Save the Harbor’s standing advice is not to swim for 24 hours after a heavy rainfall, which it defines as about three tenths of an inch in an hour.
Which brings us to Sunday
The National Weather Service has a flood watch on Suffolk County from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. Forecasters expect half an inch to two inches across the region, with narrow bands that could drop two to four inches in three hours. The heaviest rain is expected Sunday morning, tapering off in the afternoon. By the 24-hour rule, that puts Revere Beach off limits for swimming until Monday afternoon at the earliest, and later if the totals come in high. Nobody will post a sign to that effect, because the season’s signage is down. You will have to do the arithmetic yourself.
Friday and Saturday, before the rain, the brown water was most likely surf and sediment and nothing worse. After Sunday, assume runoff.
The gap in the calendar
The state runs testing and lifeguards on a school-year calendar at a beach that stays busy well into October on warm weekends. The Blue Line delivers people to the sand regardless of whether DCR has staff on it. The Revere Beach Partnership’s own FAQ tells visitors lifeguards are on duty “from late June to early September” and leaves it there. Nobody is doing anything wrong. It is just that the beach has two seasons, an official one and a real one, and the second is longer.
If you go in this month, go in with company, stay near the bathhouses where other people are, and stay out for a full day after any real rain. If the water looks brown on a calm day with no recent rain, that is the moment to call the state’s beach program and ask, because that is the case the rules do not cover.