Guide

Beach water: who samples, and what an advisory means

Checked October 9, 2026 against the Department of Environmental Services’ beach monitoring map service and its program page.

The beach tile shows what the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services (DES) publishes for the 122 stations it samples for Enterococci bacteria, from Cherry Grove at the North Carolina line to the south end of Hilton Head Island. The tile gives each station’s advisory and the day of its last sample. DES publishes no counts, so the tile prints none. This page says how the tile reads that, and what it cannot tell you.

What the tile shows

The tile reads three parts of DES’s own beach monitoring map service: the stations and their long-term advisories, the table of short-term advisories that DES’s program page prints, and each station’s latest sampling date. What each advisory means is from DES’s program page.

• Advisory (short-term): DES issues one when a sample exceeds 104 per 100 ml on two consecutive days, or on one sample when a source such as a stormwater drain is nearby. It typically lasts one to two days.
• Long-term advisory: kept year-round where stormwater pipes or swashes cross the beach and bacteria run high after rain. Most are on the Grand Strand, where they began in Myrtle Beach in 2007 and in Surfside Beach and Horry County in 2008.
• No advisory: no short-term or long-term advisory at that station.
• Season over: DES samples weekly or every two weeks from May 1 to October 1 and does not issue short-term advisories outside it, so out of season a station with no recent sample reads Season over, never clean. The long-term advisories stay.
• An advisory is not a closure. DES says wading, fishing and shell collecting do not pose a risk.
• The words are DES’s. A word the tile does not recognise shows as Check, never as clear. A station missing from the map shows “No station listed”.
• Each station is filed under the nearest board town, and every Hilton Head station under Hilton Head Island. Port Royal, Beaufort, Lady’s Island, McClellanville and Conway are more than ten miles from a station and have no beach tile.

On October 9, 2026, after the season, there were no short-term advisories and 21 long-term advisories, most on the Grand Strand’s swashes.

Every station DES samples

Anywhere else on the South Carolina 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

DES tests for Enterococci, 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

• South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, beach monitoring map service — the stations, the short-term advisory table and the sampling dates the tile reads
• SCDES, Beach Monitoring — the season, the 104 limit, and what short-term and long-term advisories mean