Pop quiz time (or should that be "poop quiz"? Ha ha!)
So, I'm curious - did Aanybody else notice the big problem with the NYC Gov/Department of Health water-quality website I've posted about twenty times in the last couple of days?
Here it is again. And I'm talking obvious. It's not like there's some broken link or a typo or something in there somewhere. Well, there could be, but that's NOT what I'm after.
P.S. - YAAAAY! :D
6 comments:
It says, "To see the current status of a beach, click on its borough in the map below." But if you click on the map it doesn't give you that information.
Ah...I didn't catch that one, I guess I've used it enough that I don't read the instructions, just scroll on down past the map to the links for the boroughs.
Nope, I was really thinking more of the fact that there's not ONE place in the entire stretch of water around Manhattan that they bother monitoring. They haven't caught on to the fact that these days, it's not just beachgoers who need this info. I can click on this map, look at the Brooklyn beaches & be quite confident that we'll be able to drop people in the water during the class I'm helping with tomorrow without any problem - but all my friends who paddle up in Manhattan? Their waters are a Giant Black Hole Of Non-Information.
DOH really ought to fix that. A few more monitoring spots at NYC Watertrail launch sites & it would be useful to a lot of people who instead are just hanging on for press releases. Bleah!
Actually I did notice that too. Are there really beaches in Manhattan?
You have blown the lid off the giant toilet bowl of non-information. The area is recommended for the "Ty-D-Bol Man" only.
here is an article I posted in 2007 on the sebago blog:
"Here and across the country, water tests on a fraction of the nation's ocean, bay and Great Lakes beaches led to a 28 percent jump in beach closings and warnings nationwide, the study showed. In Illinois, the state counted 591 beach closing days or swimming advisory days during 2006, up from a year earlier when there were 584."
p.s. read todays NYTimes article from the riverkeeper...
http://sebagocanoeclub.blogspot.com/2007/08/water-for-thoughts.html
but keep in mind, the DOH out and out lies on their reports...I have caught them putting the date like a pre dated check, they would date the report one or two days ahead of the report, put in low numbers, then change the numbers to high on the date, etc. but again, what good is a report that takes over 24 hours to come out? If you want to paddle on a sat. and you see floatables like condoms etc, you want to know immed. if the water is bad...but you have to wait 24 hrs. to find out...and by the time you get the report, the sewage will have flushed out anyway...
What I'm trying to suggest here is just a practical step that could be pushed for. Everybody's upset about how clumsily the information on the spill was disseminated. The DOH HAS a website that is specifically designed to share exactly the kind of information that needed to be shared, and in this case it worked reasonably well - it just didn't give any information to anybody in the area that was the most affected. Updating that site to give similar information to people using the water around Manhattan seems pretty much like a no-brainer of a step to take.
Of course one reason the DOH might prefer NOT to give that info is because despite the fact that there are NO official swimming beaches around Manhattan, there are still plenty of places that people can get into the water, and if the water quality updates include North River, East River & Harlem River, that might somehow be interpreted as some sort of official acknowledgement that the water that people are swimming in anyways is actually OK to swim in...
Using that as a reason to maintain an information blackout for the entire area around Manhattan seems like some awfully head-in-the-sand, down-the-rabbithole, bass-ackwards rationalization, though.
This really seems like a perfect wake-up call to the city to recognize that it's not just beachgoers that need to be kept informed.
As far as the lag - I can accept that as natural; perhaps a more direct approach to getting the info out in case of a major spill like this one should be kept at the ready. Wouldn't it have been nice if when the sewage started to spill, somebody (parks, FDNY, harbor patrol, CG Auxiliary, any or all of the above) had been called and asked to put some people out on patrol to let people who were using the water AT THAT TIME (like the NYO folks who paddled north until their noses told them to turn around, or the New York Kayak Polo team who were enjoying a pleasant evening's practice at Pier 66) know what was going on?
They wouldn't even have had to go around kicking people off the water - just tell them what was going on, let them make their own decisions and ask them to spread the word & watch for official announcements as things developed.
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