To Beach or Not to Beach?

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

Check out this article out of Chicago on beach closures. This is far from Earth-shattering news, but beach closure information needs to be communicated better, so bravo to the author. When it comes to testing beach waters, it all boils down to two issues:

1. The tests are for indicator bacteria and not necessarily the actual pathogens
2. The lag in incubation time means that test results are always an entire day old

True to form, nothing in all of Cook County is mentioned in a story that is supposed to be about Chicago beaches. It references Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, but where is Illinois? David Rockwell from the EPA Great Lakes office in Chicago and the Region 5 EPA BEACH Act coordinator officed in Chicago aren’t even quoted, and they are regional people.

The article neglects to mention that Chicago doesn’t use the internet at all to notify people of closures. Its lawyers decided that the lag in results could expose the Chicago Parks Department to liability, as people could potentially demonstrate culpability for exposing them to bad water when they find that the beach is closed the next day.

I have met and worked with every single person interviewed in this as part of developing water quality reports for Beaches911. Scott Hicks is my contact for Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Brandt Baughman is my contact for Indiana Dunes State Park. Richard Whitman is the main developer of the Project SAFE predictive model for Indiana.

Mark Pfister is the main developer in the SwimCast predictive model, and also my contact for Lake County, IL. Al Dufour works at the Research Triangle Park office and is the father of the 1982 EPA epidemiological study that this whole BEACH Act game is based on.

This reporter did a great job of landing top scientists and health professionals, but there is one mistake here—the standard for issuing a swimming advisory is 235 colonies per 100 ml of water, not per 1000 ml.

One of the most telling facts is the “humans shed 100 million E coli in 15 minutes of swimming” statistic—and that’s even without pooping in the water! Bather load is a huge problem for this reason, and also because they stir up reservoirs of bacteria that live in the sand. No wonder everyone showers when they get out of the water.