The city's last DOHMH water quality sample at any Rockaway Beach section was pulled 15 days ago — before four consecutive weekends of storms. Jacob Riis Park, run by the NPS, isn't in the DOHMH program at all.

The eight sections of Rockaway Beach that New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene monitors for enterococci bacteria last had samples pulled on July 9 — fifteen days before what the National Weather Service is forecasting as the city's first fully dry beach Saturday in more than a month.

On July 9, all eight city-managed Rockaway Beach sections, stretching from 9th Street to 149th Street in Queens, returned results well below the 35 MPN per 100 milliliters threshold at which DOHMH closes a beach, according to the department's open data. No subsequent test appears in the dataset as of July 24.

The data gap spans four straight weekends of unsettled weather — scattered showers, tornadoes, and thunderstorms — confirmed by NWS meteorologist Bryan Ramsey and reported by Gothamist on July 24. Ramsey forecast high pressure bringing sunshine and upper-70s temperatures through Saturday, July 25, the first substantial beach day since late June.

DOHMH tests city-managed ocean beaches on a roughly weekly to biweekly schedule and does not conduct expedited retests after rain events. Adjacent Jacob Riis Park — which draws comparable summer crowds to the Rockaway Beach sections and sits on National Park Service land within Gateway National Recreation Area — is not part of DOHMH's testing program. The NPS publishes no public-facing water quality dashboard for Riis swimmers.

Neither DOHMH nor the NPS had issued a beach advisory for either location as of the evening of July 24.