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San Diego Beaches Get Good Report Card

Water quality along the San Diego coast was pretty good last year. KPBS Reporter Erik Anderson has details.

San Diego Beaches Get Good Report Card

Water quality along the San Diego coast was pretty good last year. KPBS Reporter Erik Anderson has details.

Santa Monica based Heal The Bay has been rating water quality off the California coast for 18 years. The group's president Mark Gold says San Diego beaches got the best marks ever last year.

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Gold: During last summer 97 percent of the beaches ended up getting A's and three percent got B's. That means there weren't any C's, D's and F's at all. And for dry weather year round 89 percent of the beaches got A's, seven percent got B's, and there were only two percent C's and two percent F's.

Gold says sewage flows out of the Tijuana River Estuary continue to be a persistent pollution problem. However, he says no San Diego county beaches made the groups list of the state's ten Beach Bummers.

Of the 517 statewide beaches in the survey, 93 percent received grades of A or B during the high-traffic summer beach season -- an 8 percent improvement from the previous season. Record-low winter rainfall in Southern California is getting credit.

Erik Anderson, KPBS News.