FAIRHOPE, Ala. -The beach at Fairhope’s North Beach Park was empty Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before a red swimming advisory was lifted by the Baldwin County Health Department.

But over the Earth Day weekend, the beach was crowded and many swimmers, including children, were enjoying the water, apparently without knowledge of the advisory posted April 22, or swimming despite the warning that “there may be an increased risk of illness associated with swimming.”

The county health department, in conjunction with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, conducts a beach monitoring program throughout Baldwin County, but Fairhope’s beach was the only one with a posted advisory this past weekend, according to health department staff.

“We had consecutive tests last week,” said Teddy King, with the Baldwin County Health Department, explaining that high levels on consecutive days results in a swimming advisory being issued.

The threshold level for an advisory is 104 enterococcus organisms per 100 milliliters for marine water, according to the advisory press release distributed April 22. That species is a “a pathogen indicator,” not a contaminant itself, which indicates the possible presence of pollutants, according to staff.

“On Tuesday it was 10,” King said. “Then on Wednesday it went to 747. We resampled on Thursday, and it was 133.”

On Friday, April 22, their tests showed 207, which is when the Fairhope beach was posted with the swimming advisory sign, King said.

It’s possible that not all swimmers saw the warning because it is located in a line of sight behind a larger red stop sign at the entrance to the park. There was no one taking admission fees that day, and drivers could drive through without stopping, which would have made it more difficult to avoid seeing the smaller red warning on the “Swimming Water Quality Status” sign behind it.

A number of blog postings in local media outlets have noted “the irony” of the swimming advisory being posted at the Fairhope beach during the city’s highly touted Earth Day festival.

“The result from the Fairhope Beach site tested yesterday is 84 col/100 ml (below the EPA threshold of 104/100 ml),” Suzi Rice, of ADEM, stated in an email the afternoon of April 27.

She stated that the county health department would be lifting the advisory that afternoon and the sign at the site would be changed back to green, and that the ADEM website that provides data on the beach monitoring program would be updated as well.

No staff persons at the county or city level would speculate on the cause of the increased levels, other than to state there was “no linkage” between the city’s sewer system and the testing levels.

In the past, some government employees have credited the higher levels to “nonpoint source” pollution such as stormwater runoff, according to staff.

“For more information on the beach program and enterococcus bacteria, you can go to www.adem.alabama.gov, then click Programs, Coastal, Beach Monitoring Information, and there is a brief write-up about the program, as well as individual spreadsheets for each of the 25 beach sites and data from those sites,” Rice stated.