DRNA’s weekly beach notice, published September 16, names one beach as not suitable for swimming. Pico de Piedra in Aguada has now been named in 8 of the 60 notices on file.
This week’s DRNA notice, published September 16 from samples taken September 14, names just one beach as not suitable for swimming: Pico de Piedra in Aguada. That beach has now shown up in 8 of the 60 notices on file.
Zooming out over the full season, Tropical Beach in Naguabo has been named most often, in 25 of the 60 notices, a reminder that this week’s single flag is only a narrow slice of a much patchier record.
Not suitable for swimming this week
| Beach (DRNA's station name, in the order the notice lists them) | Town | Enterococcus (Colonies per 100 mL, the last number published for the station; the federal Beach Action Value limit is 70) | Sampled (The day that number's sample was collected) | Times flagged this season (Notices naming this beach, out of the 60 on file since March 17) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pico de Piedra | Aguada | — | — | 8 of 60 |
Off the list since the last notice
| Beach (Named in the previous notice, not in this one) | Town | Now (Its state today: within limits, or not sampled recently) | Sampled (The day its last published sample was collected) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balneario Manuel Nolo Morales; Sardinera | Dorado | Not named in this notice | — |
| Playa Sixto Escobar | San Juan | Not named in this notice | — |
| Tropical Beach | Naguabo | Not named in this notice | — |
| Playa Guayanés | Yabucoa | Not named in this notice | — |
| Playa Cabullón | Ponce | Not named in this notice | — |
Coming off the list is not a certificate: it means this week’s notice does not name the beach, from samples taken September 14.
What this notice does and does not say
DRNA publishes the notice days after the water is sampled — this one covers samples taken September 14, posted September 16, and a heavy shower can push a beach over the 70-colony action value hours after a clean sample was taken. A beach that is not named was either within limits or was not sampled, and the two are not the same thing.
Volunteer labs test some beaches DRNA does not, and their results are published separately: they are not part of this notice and cannot put a beach under advisory.
Every monitoring station, with its own number and its own date, is on the beach water quality page; DRNA’s notice itself is here (and as a PDF, which is a scan).
This is the 3rd Beach Watch (the previous one is here).
Source: DRNA “Notificación Monitoria de Playas”, posted September 16; samples taken September 14. Numbers from CARICOOS’s monitoring feed. The Beach Action Value is 70 colonies of Enterococcus per 100 mL; DRNA’s notice is the only thing that puts a beach under a swimming advisory, and it is superseded by the next one.
Corrected October 7: an earlier version said 48 of 49 stations had no recent sample and gave Pico de Piedra’s last count as 209 from August 24, and it listed the five beaches off the list as not sampled since late August; the station readings we held that morning were out of date, and DRNA had sampled on September 14.