The beach at the federally run Jacob Riis Park in Queens reopened for swimming on Friday after being closed to the public for a day due to high bacterial levels found in water samples, the National Park Service said.
The Gateway National Recreation Area had advised people to avoid contact with the water on Thursday when temperatures reached the mid-90s.
“Water checks are done on a weekly basis and delivered to state certified labs for analysis according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for microbial contamination,” a spokesperson for the NPS said in a statement on Thursday. "If there is an exceedance than the beaches are closed and daily sample collections are made until the bacteria count is below the threshold. The enterococcus threshold is 104 CFU/100 mL.”
Meanwhile, the city’s parks department said in a statement on Thursday that it had not received any water quality advisories from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — which tests all city beaches weekly, according to Meghan Lalor, the city's parks department Director of Media Relations — for its beaches in the Rockaways, which had remained open.