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Thursday, February 05, 2009

Environment - "Techniques that have dramatically reduced contamination at beaches in Racine, Wis."

Laurie Wink has an interesting article today in the Michigan City News-Dispatch:

Beach advisories and closings at Racine's North Beach went from 62 in 2000 to only one last year, said Julie Kinzelman, with the Racine Health Department. She shared successful beach management strategies at a public meetings in the city council chambers Wednesday night. Mayor Chuck Oberlie, chair of the environmental management policy committee of the Northern Indiana Regional Planning Commission, invited Kinzelman to address the NIRPC committee today.

Indiana has cause for concern about beach water quality, with the state ranked second in the number of beaches exceeding national standards in a 2006 study. In the study, Washington Park beaches were the third highest among all Indiana beaches.

Michigan City could take a financial hit if public beaches are seen as too risky to visit, Kinzelman said. And water quality monitoring is critical to public health as more people use the Great Lakes beaches.

Monitoring involves measuring E. coli levels as indicators of contamination. Besides human and animal waste, E. coli comes from beach sand and seagulls. High E. coli levels can cause stomach aches, diarrhea, skin rashes and respiratory infections, she said. Children are particularly vulnerable because they take in twice as much water as adults when they're swimming, Kinzelman said.

"Swimming is essentially communal bathing," she said. "When you're ill you shouldn't be swimming."

The federal Clean Water Act requires each state to monitor and notify the public of water quality on coastal beaches. Indiana requires water testing two days a week. The La Porte County Health Department uses monitoring data to make decisions about beach closings here. Most E. coli monitoring tests take up to 18 hours to produce results, said Kinzelman, who now is studying a new testing method that produces results in several hours. An ongoing problem, Kinzelman said, is figuring out the key sources of the contamination.

"About 90 percent of beach closing actions are caused by unknown sources," she said. "It's not just what happens at the beach, but also what happens in the watershed."

Three approaches worked in Racine to reduce the numbers of closings due to high E. coli readings. One of the easiest was changing the beach grooming strategy to create deeper grooves, almost like furrows plowed in a farm field, Kinzelman said. Racine added lined waste cans with lids, to cut down on bird scavenging. Volunteers planted dune grass in drainage areas to absorb waste water.

Racine also passed an ordinance prohibiting feeding shore birds, Kinzelman said, but a lot of public education is needed to make it effective.

A more costly but effective approach is to re-engineer storm water systems that feed into the beaches and lake water. Al Walus, general manager of the Michigan City Sanitary District, said Kinzelman's information will be useful to the Trail Creek Watershed Steering Committee in helping to pinpoint sources of E. coli in the Trail Creek system.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 5, 2009 01:39 PM
Posted to Environment