Is the water clean today? Here’s how to actually know.

The Florida Healthy Beaches program, running since August 2000, samples beach water and analyzes it for enterococci — bacteria that live in the intestines of warm-blooded animals. The bacteria themselves rarely cause illness; they’re an indicator. High counts suggest other organisms may be present, so when samples exceed the EPA-based thresholds, the county health department issues an advisory and posts signs at the specific beach until follow-up samples clear.

Locally, both of our coastal counties participate. The Duval County health department samples the ocean shoreline from Jacksonville Beach north to Little Talbot Island on a bi-weekly cycle from March through October, and the St. Johns County department samples multiple stations along its coast, publishing results as Good, Moderate, or Poor with public announcements when a site goes to advisory. The county health department pages are the live sources, and they’re free.

The honest interpretation: an advisory is a snapshot of one station at one sampling, most often driven by runoff after heavy rain, and it is beach-specific and temporary — it means don’t swim at that spot until the follow-up clears, not that a beach is dirty as a place. The reverse discipline matters too: a beach’s reputation, good or bad, tells you nothing about today. The current posting does.

For homeowners and buyers, the program is quietly useful in a second way: the long-run pattern of a shoreline’s results is part of a location’s truth, the same way flood zones are. Our beaches generally test well — that is exactly the kind of claim that deserves a live source rather than my assertion, which is why this page points you at the county dashboards instead of freezing a rating into text that could rot. What oceanfront actually costs to own →