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Thank you for this opportunity to testify on the Beaches Environmental Assessment, 

 Closure, and Health Act of 1993 (H.R. 31). The Natural Resources Defense Council 

 (NRDC) strongly supports this legislation which would mandate uniform standards, 

 monitoring and public notification requirements for coastal recreational waters. NRDC 

 believes this legislation is necessary to protect beachgoers nationwide and to provide 

 them with a consistent and safe level of protection wherever they may swim. 



NRDC has just released its third annual inventory of ocean and bay beach closings and 

 advisories, Testing the Waters III: Closing, Costs, and Cleanup at U.S. Beaches, which 

 documents that there were over 2600 closings and advisories at ocean and bay beaches in 

 1992. (A copy of this report has been provided to the Subcommittee and a Summary of 

 Findings from this report has been made available to aU Subcommittee members.) The 

 number of closings is evidence that coastal pollution continues to be a serious problem in 

 many parts of this country. It also documents the fact that 8 of the 22 coastal states 

 surveyed do no monitoring of coastal recreational waters for swimmer safety (despite 

 evidence of coastal pollution problems in those states and despite the sizeable revenues 

 generated by coastal tourism); 5 coastal states have limited monitoring programs which 

 apply to only a portion of their coasthnes or involve infrequent (once a year) monitoring; 

 and only 9 states regularly monitor all or a significant portion of their coastline. 



Not only do monitoring practices differ throughout the country; bacterial standards for 

 recreational waters-standards that supposedly protect public health-are inconsistent 

 among and within states. States use different indicator organisms to determine the 



