Guide

Beach water: who samples, and what an advisory means

Checked October 9, 2026 against Georgia Healthy Beaches’ own beach advisory map file and its program page.

The beach tile shows what Georgia Healthy Beaches publishes for the 30 beaches it samples for Enterococcus bacteria. The program is run by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Coastal Resources Division with the Department of Public Health’s Coastal Health District. The tile gives each beach’s count, its status and the day of its last sample. This page says how the tile reads that, and what it cannot tell you. Seven remote islands (Little Tybee, Wassaw, St. Catherines, Blackbeard, Wolf, Middle Ossabaw and Rainbow Bar) are on the program’s map with no sample at all, and Cumberland Island’s beach is not on it: nobody samples them.

What the tile shows

The tile reads the file behind the program’s own beach advisory map, rewritten every hour: one row for each beach, with its Enterococcus count per 100 ml of water, its status, and the day of the sample.

• Acceptable (green): the latest sample was at or under 70 per 100 ml.
• Advisory (yellow on the program’s map): the latest sample was over 70. The program places the beach under advisory and retests it the same week.
• Permanent advisory: bacteria levels there stay elevated, swimming and wading are advised against, and the beach is tested four times a year. On October 9, 2026 those were Clam Creek and St. Andrews on Jekyll Island and Kings Ferry on the Ogeechee.
• An advisory is not a closure. The program never closes beaches; an advisory covers the stretch of water around the sample, not the sand and not the whole island.
• The words are the program’s. A status the tile does not recognise shows as Check, never as clear. A beach missing from the file shows “No sample listed”.
• Sampling slows in winter. Tybee, St. Simons and Jekyll are tested weekly in the swimming season and every two weeks in winter; the sandbars and Little St. Simons less often. A sample can be weeks old, and the tile always prints its date.
• Each beach is filed under the nearest board town. The Sapelo River sandbars (Dallas Bluff and Contentment Bluff) are more than eight miles from any town on the board; they are filed under Sunbury and Sapelo Island. Midway, Darien, Woodbine, Kingsland, St. Marys and Cumberland Island are more than ten miles from a sampled beach and have no beach tile.

On October 9, 2026 two beaches were under advisory: Sea Island South (96 per 100 ml) and St. Simons Lighthouse (71), both sampled October 5 and 6.

Every beach the program samples

Anywhere else on the Georgia shore is not sampled. A beach nobody samples is not a clean beach. It is a beach with no result.

What it cannot tell you

The program tests for Enterococcus, a sign of sewage and runoff. It does not test for Vibrio, which lives naturally in warm salt and brackish water, or for anything else in the water.

Sources

• Georgia Department of Natural Resources, beach advisory map file — the beach rows the tile reads
• Georgia Healthy Beaches — the line at 70, what an advisory and a permanent advisory mean, and how often each beach is sampled; (912) 264-7218