Even a little bit of rain these days is making it harder for Rye and other Sound Shore beaches to remain clean and open.
Meanwhile, some beaches have been able to handle the additional stormwater runoff better than others.
In the latest beach grades issued by Save the Sound, only nine of the 19 public and private Long Island Sound beaches in Westchester County had consistently clean water in summer 2025.
Six of the nine clubs to receive an A or B grades are in Rye.
Shenorock Shore Club and American Yacht Club were both graded A+, the only two to receive an A grade in Westchester. Westchester Country Club and Playland Beach both received a B. Manursing Island Club and Rye Town Park-Oakland Beach were both graded B-. Coveleigh Club received a C.
“As we have seen over the years, there consistently is a high number of beaches that receive great marks for swimming all around Long Island Sound,” Peter Linderoth, director of healthy waters and lands for Save the Sound, said in a recent statement. “But as we also have seen, nearly one-quarter of Sound beaches face some level of water quality challenges that need to be looked into and addressed.”
Even in a relatively dry year — just 16 inches of rain accumulated in Rye in 2025 — stormwater runoff was severe enough to close beaches and fail health standards across the county.
Twenty-two years of monitoring data document simultaneous progress and deterioration across all of Rye’s beaches. Dry-weather contamination, the baseline sewage leakage that once made waters unsafe even on sunny days, has fallen sharply across the board.
Oakland Beach’s dry-weather failure rate dropped from 14 percent in the early 2000s to 3 percent today; Rye Playland’s from 14 to 7 percent; Coveleigh’s from 14 to 8 percent; Manursing and Westchester Country Club Beach from 8 percent each to 3 percent; Shenorock’s from 10 percent to zero.
But wet-weather pollution has become significantly worse.
Oakland Beach’s wet-weather failure rate has climbed to 26 percent, higher than 20 years ago. Rye Playland’s has risen to 28 percent.
Among the private beaches, Coveleigh’s wet-weather failure rate has fallen from 43 percent to 17 percent over two decades, an improvement. Manursing and Westchester Country Club beach have seen their rates tick back up after a cleaner stretch from 2018 through 2022.
The worst single reading in the Rye dataset came at Playland in August 2024: 7,270 colony-forming units (CFU), or bacterial count, after nearly three inches of rain, almost 70 times the safe limit.
The chronic problem is improving. The acute, storm-driven problem is not.
Whenever it rains, stormwater runoff is particularly bad in developed areas with significant impervious surface coverage near a beach and in the nearby lands that drain to it.
Rainfall cannot penetrate hardened surfaces like roofs, driveways, streets, sidewalks, and parking lots. Instead, it cascades into catch basins and storm drains, carrying along fertilizer, pesticides, oil and fuel residue, tire debris, and fecal bacteria, which can come from improperly discarded pet waste or waste from raccoons, rodents, or other wildlife living inside stormwater pipes.
Too often, stormwater also picks up spills and leaks from sanitary sewer infrastructure and septic systems, adding human waste to the mix of polluted runoff delivered to area beaches.
Each individual storm shows how varied the water quality can be between beaches and clubs in Rye, and how little it takes to contaminate some of them.
For example, on the morning of June 9, 2025, 0.87 inches of rain fell over Rye. That’s a small storm.
But the reaction was big.
At Rye Playland Beach, bacteria counts climbed to 882 CFU per 100 milliliters. Oakland Beach had 785 CFU, and Coveleigh Club 638, according to water-quality samples collected by the Westchester County Health Department.
The state’s safe-swimming standard is 104 CFU. All three beaches registered six to eight times the safe limit following a storm that was not significant.
Meanwhile, at the American Yacht Club, half a mile away on Milton Point, the reading was 1 CFU.
Same shoreline, same storm. Very different water.
In the most recent storm in Rye, 1.96 inches of rain fell in a 24-hour span on July 7. The county health department closed Coveleigh Club’s beach, along with multiple beaches in Mamaroneck and New Rochelle.
Swimmers were advised to wait 24 to 48 hours before entering the water, providing a stark reminder that the infrastructure fixes of the past are struggling to keep pace with the increasingly heavy storms of the present.
“Stormwater pollution is a leading challenge to water quality at Long Island Sound beaches,” Linderoth said. “Expanding the use of green infrastructure — rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, constructed wetlands — is a critical step toward reducing stormwater runoff. The more stormwater can be filtered or diverted before reaching the sound, the more water quality will improve, and the better a beach’s grade will be.”
