ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Following recent water quality evaluations, the Alabama Department of Public Health has issued a public swimming advisory for the waters at Perdido Bay at Kee Avenue.
According to officials, two successive tests indicated poor water quality, revealing enterococci bacteria counts that exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe threshold of 104 organisms per 100 milliliters for marine water. Public health officials warn that swimming in the affected waters may carry an increased risk of illness.
Separately, recent testing also revealed raised levels of enterococci bacteria at Orange Beach Waterfront Park. That site has not received a formal advisory, but it is being monitored.
What an Advisory Actually Means
A swimming advisory is not a closure. The water is not roped off, and access is not restricted. An advisory is a public notification that sampling has found bacteria levels above the federal recreational threshold, and that people who swim there face an elevated risk of illness.
The decision is left to the individual. What the advisory supplies is the information needed to make it.
The threshold itself — 104 enterococci organisms per 100 milliliters — is the EPA’s benchmark for marine recreational water. It is a statistical standard rather than a bright line between safe and dangerous. It corresponds to an estimated rate of gastrointestinal illness among swimmers, and it is set at a level intended to keep that rate low across a population of bathers.
The requirement of two successive failed tests before an advisory is issued is a deliberate safeguard. A single elevated sample can reflect a transient condition — a rain event, a temporary disturbance, a sampling anomaly. Two consecutive exceedances indicate a persistent condition rather than a spike.
Why Enterococci Is the Bacterium Being Counted
Enterococci are not themselves the primary threat. They are an indicator organism.
The bacteria live in the intestinal tracts of warm-blooded animals, including humans, and their presence in a waterbody indicates that fecal material has entered it. What actually makes swimmers sick is the range of pathogens — viruses, bacteria and protozoa — that can accompany that contamination. Testing directly for every one of those pathogens would be slow and prohibitively expensive.
Testing for enterococci is fast, inexpensive and well correlated with health risk in marine water, which is why regulatory programs use it as a proxy. A high count does not prove any specific pathogen is present. It means the conditions that would allow pathogens to be present have been documented.
Illnesses associated with swimming in water carrying elevated fecal indicator bacteria are most commonly gastrointestinal, along with skin, ear, eye and respiratory complaints. Risk is higher for young children, older adults and people with open wounds or weakened immune systems.
Where the Bacteria Come From
High bacterial concentrations can occur due to stormwater runoff, malfunctioning septic systems or agricultural runoff after heavy rains. Authorities noted that no known sewage spills have occurred in the area.
That last point narrows the likely causes considerably. In the absence of a sanitary sewer overflow, the usual explanation along the Gulf Coast is stormwater.
Rainfall running across developed and undeveloped land picks up whatever is on the surface — animal waste, pet waste, wildlife droppings, residue from agricultural land — and carries it into ditches, storm drains, creeks and ultimately into bays. In a watershed with substantial impervious surface, that runoff arrives fast and concentrated rather than filtering slowly through soil.
Failing or undersized septic systems are the other common contributor in coastal areas, particularly in older subdivisions built on sandy soils with high water tables. A septic drain field that is not functioning properly in saturated ground can discharge into surface water without any visible sign at the site.
Bay and bayou locations like Perdido Bay tend to be more susceptible than open Gulf beaches for reasons of hydrology. Enclosed and semi-enclosed water flushes more slowly, so bacteria introduced by a rain event stay in the water column longer before dilution and sunlight reduce the counts. The Gulf-facing beaches, by contrast, get constant exchange with open water.
The Monitoring Program Behind the Numbers
This routine monitoring is part of a bacteriological water quality and notification program operated by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management in partnership with the Alabama Department of Public Health.
The program is funded under a grant from the EPA’s BEACH Act Program and conducts regular testing across 25 high-use coastal recreational sites.
The BEACH Act — the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health Act — established the federal framework requiring coastal states to monitor recreational waters and notify the public when standards are exceeded. Before it, monitoring varied widely from state to state, and beachgoers in many places had no systematic way to know what was in the water.
Twenty-five sites across coastal Alabama, sampled on a regular schedule, is what that framework looks like in practice here. ADEM offers the testing service to monitor environmental health, and the results are consistently made available to the public.
How the Advisory Gets Lifted
Water quality monitoring at the affected locations will remain ongoing. The advisory for Perdido Bay will be officially lifted once bacteria values drop back below the established EPA safety threshold.
In practice, advisories driven by stormwater frequently resolve within days to a couple of weeks. Bacteria counts fall as the water flushes, as ultraviolet light from sunlight kills organisms in the water column, and as the rain event that caused the spike recedes further into the past. Advisories that persist for longer generally point to a continuing source rather than a one-time input.
Because the site is resampled on the program’s schedule rather than on demand, there is typically a lag between conditions improving and the advisory being lifted. The advisory remains in effect until the sampling confirms the improvement.
Practical Guidance for Residents and Visitors
For the duration of the advisory, health officials advise against swimming in the affected water at Perdido Bay at Kee Avenue.
Several general precautions apply to coastal recreation whenever bacteria levels are a concern. Avoid swimming for roughly 24 to 72 hours after heavy rainfall, when runoff-driven bacteria counts are typically highest. Avoid submerging the head or swallowing water. Keep open cuts and wounds out of the water. Rinse off with clean water after swimming. And take particular care with young children, who tend to swallow more water while playing.
Activities that do not involve full-body contact — boating, fishing from a boat or pier, paddling — carry substantially lower risk than swimming, because the exposure pathway for most of these illnesses is ingestion.
Where to Check Current Conditions
For real-time updates on coastal water quality and advisory statuses, residents and visitors can access public data directly through ADEM’s official beach monitoring portal.
That portal is the authoritative source for whether a given site is currently under advisory. Because conditions change with rainfall and sampling cycles, checking it before a planned swim is more reliable than assuming a location’s status from a previous week.
Current Status
Under advisory: Perdido Bay at Kee Avenue — two successive tests exceeded the EPA threshold of 104 enterococci organisms per 100 milliliters for marine water.
Elevated levels noted, no formal advisory: Orange Beach Waterfront Park.
Known cause: None identified. Authorities noted that no known sewage spills have occurred in the area.
Monitoring: Ongoing at both locations through the ADEM/ADPH coastal beach monitoring program.
How the Sampling Program Actually Runs
Understanding what a coastal advisory does and does not tell you starts with understanding the sampling schedule behind it.
Monitoring at 25 high-use coastal recreational sites means each location is sampled on a rotation rather than continuously. A water sample is collected, cultured in a laboratory, and read after an incubation period. That laboratory step is the reason results are never instantaneous — the count being reported today reflects the condition of the water when the sample was drawn, not the condition at the moment the advisory is issued.
The practical implication is that advisories lag reality in both directions. Water that failed two consecutive tests may already be improving by the time the advisory posts. Water that has just been hit by a heavy rain may not yet show up as a problem because it has not been sampled since.
That is not a flaw in the program so much as an inherent property of culture-based testing, and it is why beachgoers are generally advised to treat recent heavy rainfall as a reason for caution regardless of what any posted advisory currently says.
Why Bay Sites Fail More Often Than Gulf Beaches
The pattern across coastal monitoring programs is consistent: enclosed bays, bayous and river mouths exceed thresholds far more frequently than open Gulf-facing beaches do.
Three factors drive that. Bays receive freshwater runoff directly from their watersheds, so whatever the land contributes arrives concentrated rather than diluted. Bays flush slowly, so bacteria that enter stay in the water column longer. And bays are typically shallower and more sheltered, which reduces the wave mixing and ultraviolet exposure that help break contamination down.
Open Gulf beaches have the opposite profile on all three counts — limited direct runoff, constant exchange with a very large body of water, and heavy sun and wave action. That is why an advisory at a bay location often sits alongside clean results at nearby beaches, and why the advisory should be read as specific to the named site rather than as a regional condition.
The Longer-Term Picture
Repeat advisories at a given location, over seasons rather than weeks, are generally the signal that a watershed has a structural issue rather than a weather-driven one. Those are addressed through stormwater infrastructure, septic-to-sewer conversions, buffer restoration and source-tracking studies that identify where contamination originates.
Coastal Baldwin County has been working through versions of those questions for years, as development has added impervious surface across watersheds that drain into the same bays used for recreation. Drainage studies, outfall work and stormwater projects are recurring items on local agendas for reasons directly connected to water quality readings like these.
For the current advisory, though, the immediate answer is simpler. Authorities identified no sewage spill. The monitoring continues, and the advisory at Perdido Bay at Kee Avenue stands until two things happen: the water is sampled again, and the count comes back below 104.