Guide

Beach water: who samples, and what an advisory means

Checked September 29, 2026 against the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s beach monitoring map layer and its program pages.

The beach tile shows what the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) publishes for the 21 beaches its Beach Monitoring Program samples for Enterococcus bacteria: whether a water contact advisory or a closure is up, the stretch of beach it covers, the day it began and the day of the last sample. This page says how the tile reads that, and what it cannot tell you.

What the tile shows

The tile reads MDEQ’s own map layer, one row for each sampling station: the beach, the streets it runs between, whether an advisory or a closure is up, MDEQ’s sentence about it, the day it began and the day of the last sample. MDEQ’s layer carries no bacteria counts, so the tile shows none.

• Advisory is MDEQ’s water contact advisory: bacteria over the water quality criteria, usually from natural causes such as wind and heavy rain. MDEQ resamples every day until the numbers come back down.
• Closed is a closure: a known source of pollution, such as a broken sewer line, near the station. MDEQ says closures are rare.
• No advisory means MDEQ has neither up at that beach, and the line gives the day of the last sample.
• The words are MDEQ’s. A status the tile does not recognise shows as Check, never as clear. A beach missing from MDEQ’s layer shows “No sample listed”.
• Each beach is filed under the nearest board town.

On September 29, 2026 MDEQ had one water contact advisory up, at Gulfport West Beach from Marie Avenue to Camp Avenue, since September 24.

Every beach MDEQ samples

Sampling and analysis are done for MDEQ by the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory. The Mississippi Sound shore away from these 21 stretches, and the bayous and rivers, are not sampled. A beach nobody samples is not a clean beach. It is a beach with no result.

What it cannot tell you

MDEQ does not test for Vibrio, the bacteria behind most “flesh-eating” infections: it lives naturally in warm salt and brackish water and is not a sign of pollution. A beach with no advisory still carries that risk for anyone with an open cut or a weakened immune system. The Mississippi State Department of Health explains it.

Sources

• Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, beach monitoring map layer (BeachMonitoringView) — the station rows the tile reads
• MDEQ, Mississippi Beach Monitoring Program — the program’s own map, its history of advisories and its questions and answers
• MDEQ, what an advisory and a closure are