Current Water Quality Advisories


The State of Hawaii, Department of Health, Clean Water Branch offers up-to-date information on bacteria levels and brown-water advisories along with aerial photos from Google maps through an interactive widget, right below on this webpage. In the widget’s top right-hand corner is a menu button with “Home”, “Viewer”, “Advisories”, “Polluted Runoff Projects”, “Watershed Based Plans”, and “Watersheds”. Advisories can be accessed from buttons on the bottom left and right of the widget. Also, the “Zoom To” feature allows you to quickly focus on a selected area of the state.

Some of the system features include:

  • A quick overview of all active advisories in a single list.
  • Search functions that allow users to search for information by island and type of advisory.
  • Pin icons on a map that users can click on to show advisories for specific locations, as well as the date they were posted.
  • The ability to subscribe to notifications by hitting a button on the website instead of requesting a subscription via email.
  • Notifications to subscribers when water advisories have been canceled.
In the future, this system will also allow users to receive notifications via text message and select the specific island and types of advisories they wish to get.

The Clean Water Branch is required to establish a beach monitoring program for the state’s more than 250 beaches and to provide public notification when bacteria levels exceed a specified threshold level. This includes advisories for temporary or permanent elevations of bacteria, sewage spills, or brown-water advisories following rainy weather that causes runoff to the beaches. Signs are also posted on beaches.