Beach and Bay Website Mobile Application

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2014

The County of San Diego’s Beach and Bay Monitoring Program protects public health at recreational beaches and bays countywide. It does this by monitoring and sampling water at more than 80 beaches and waterways, then notifying the public to let visitors and residents know when the water’s safe. Notifying people quickly has been the biggest challenge. We do it by using multiple channels: hotlines, press releases and social media that are updated 24-hours-a-day, 365 days a year. In January we unveiled the new centerpiece of our notification system, a “mobilized” Web application (“App”), (www.sdbeachinfo.com), where anyone can access to information at any time, on their smartphones, tablets or computers. The app was created specifically so it could relay easy-to-use maps and information on mobile devices, allowing people to get updated water-quality information “on-the-go,” even when at beaches or away from home. The app was designed to quickly and efficiently provide the public with “at a glance” information in different formats, including lists and an interactive mapping feature, that identify potentially unhealthy water quality and areas that are more susceptible to poor water quality because of nearby surface water-runoff sources. Within the first two months of going live (January & February) the App received nearly 7,000 visits (measurement of web traffic), which is more than the old website received during the entire previous year. To date, the number of visitors continues to increase with an average of about 120 visitors each day. This is expected to increase significantly as summer approaches.