Are New Jersey Beaches really more polluted than average?

[scrambledeggs]

When I was a little boy back in the ‘day’ I remember reading Mad Magazine and hearing Late night comics, stand up comics, and such make jokes about New Jersey’s beaches, implying that they were filled with medical waste.

Is this true? Not just the medical waste, but are new Jersey’s beaches substantially more polluted than average? Are they no go zones? Does New York City dump its pollution south (or do the currents carry it south)?

Or is it just an unfair stereotype? Never actually went to a NJ beach, but I have to say, the old jokes don’t make me want to vacation . . .

[Q.E.D]

Not at all.

–Q.E.D., Jersey born and raised.

[CalMeacham]

New Jersey Beaches aren’t terribly polluted – a very few well-publicized cases poisoned the well.
I grew up in New Jersey, and I’d jump in anywhere along the shore (and frequently have), but you’d have to drag me into Revere Beach here in Massachusetts.

[MLS]

If you want some specifics, the state DEP has a beaches website that you can use to check the specific conditions along the shore.

Also, from here :

New Jersey was the first state to have a statewide mandatory beach protection program to include a bacteria standard, a testing protocol, and mandatory closure requirements whenever the bacteria standard is exceeded. Since 1986, the New Jersey Department of Health, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the county health departments of all four
Atlantic coastal counties as well as Middlesex County, and seven local environmental health agencies have jointly run the Cooperative Coastal Monitoring Program, sampling 326 sites at 326 ocean and bay beaches each week.

There are beaches in other places that could be horribly polluted but you’d never know it because they are not monitored.

[Gaudere]

[Moderator Hat ON]

This has a factual and discoverable answer, so off to General Questions.

[Moderator Hat OFF]