NRDC Posts Continual Updates re Beach Closings, How to Protect you and your Family from Health Impacts of Oil on our Beaches.

Via NRDC’s Health and the Environment.

For 20 summers, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) has published Testing the Waters, a national report on beach water quality.

Our report has been one of NRDC’s most influential.  TTW first drew attention to the lack of information available to the public on beach water quality—and the presence all too often of pathogens in bathing waters.   TTW has subsequently been instrumental in helping to motivate a massive increase in beach water quality testing across the U.S.; it also played a major role in amendments to the Clean Water Act (commonly referred to as “the Beach Act”) that also improved and standardized monitoring.  It’s a report that identified a problem and led to major progress to solve that problem.  And it continues to be a barometer of how clean our beaches are in the U.S.

The next edition of Testing the Waters, covering 2009, will be released on July 28.  But today we are adding a feature to our website  that collects and reports how the tragic oil spill is affecting beaches along the Gulf coast.

In 1984, David left the cold Philly suburbs for college at U.C. Berkeley, and has been in California ever since, save three years during law school. He spent three years at a big law firm before coming to Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where he hoped he could combine legal practice with a subject he cared about, the environment. NRDC has enabled him to do that, and he has been there for nearly 14 years. NRDC just launched a new national water program, that integrates our advocacy efforts across the country. The focus of their work is ensuring safe and sufficient water for people and ecosystems. Water is one of the major environmental issues of the 21st Century—a natural resource that is in short supply in many regions and is likely to become even more scarce as population grows and climate changes. There’s a lot to do, and David is going to be focused on how NRDC can make the biggest contribution to ensuring the water we have is clean and we use it as efficiently as we can. Check out David’s NRDC blog for more.