Parlee Beach gets same-day test results of water quality, but public can't see them

A trial water-testing program at Parlee Beach is producing same-day results — they're just not provided to anyone thinking of a swim.

It's frustrating that a pilot project is actively collecting usable data from Parlee Beach but not sharing it with people who need to know the water's condition, said Bill Ross, a resident of Shediac and a member of the Red Dot Association of Shediac Bay.

"It's important that we have a test result in a timely manner," he said.

The beach on the Northumberland Strait has had a long and rocky history of water-quality problems, with fecal counts some years that exceeded limits and forced the provincial park to warn swimmers away for days at a time.

So far this year, the beach has posted three No Swimming advisories, two in June, and the most recent on Friday. In each case, the advisory was based on samples taken for testing the day before. 

The test results shared with the public are culture-based and take 24 hours, from sampling to being posted at the beach or online, the Environment Department says.

The pilot project that began at Parlee last summer uses a different kind of test, called a qPCR test, which stands for quantitative polymerase chain reaction. 

These results are available in little over three hours but are not being made public during the pilot project, Clarissa Anderson, spokesperson of the Environment Department, said in an email.

When asked why the results are being withheld, Anderson did not address the question.

The culture method is used by some beaches across the country, she said.

The qPCR  method works by using DNA technology, according to Jeremy Duguay, an applications scientist at LuminUltra, a biological diagnostic testing company with headquarters in Fredericton.

It "allows you to select an organism based on a unique DNA signature," he said. From this, a lab can to quantify how much of a particular organism is present in a sample.

This new technology has not been widely adopted in Atlantic Canada.

Anderson said the pilot project will continue this summer, but no decision has been made about whether to use it after that.