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Swim At Your Own Risk
Produced by Michael Puente on Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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Photo by Jessi Pervola |
With gas prices in Chicago still above $4 a gallon, families are driving less and trying to keep summer fun closer to home. Chicago is home to 23 beaches. And, in nearby Northwest Indiana, there are 33. So, you don’t have to drive far to enjoy a day at the beach. But a new report suggests Lake Michigan’s polluted with high amounts of bacteria. And that federal environmental officials need to do a better job making sure beaches are as clean as they can be.
Lacey Colquitt couldn’t ask for a more perfect day to spend at the beach. It’s 90-plus degrees under bright, sunny skies, so Colquitt is letting her 2-year-old daughter play on the sand at Marquette Park Beach in Gary, Indiana, while she soaks up the sun. But Colquitt wouldn’t allow her daughter, or her husband for that matter, to actually get in the water.
COLQUITT: I wanted to take her in to the water. There’s so much filth and algae and sand and other things floating in there, we just decided to stay on shore.
Colquitt didn’t see any warning signs telling her stay out of the water, but she could see for herself.
COLQUITT: Like sitting here you can see the water is just dirty.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, has been watching the water for years. It just released its 18th annual report on water quality at vacation beaches. The environmental watchdog group says bacteria is building up in the lake in Indiana and Illinois, and says officials aren’t sure of its origin.
HENDERSON: What we are calling for, first and foremost, understand where the contimation is coming from.
That’s Henry Henderson, who heads the NRDC’s Midwest Program.
HENDERSON: There needs to be a better understanding about what the sources so we can clean up the sources and we can prevent the contamination from occurring.
Henderson says high bacteria levels can and do make people sick. Bacteria can come from a number of sources, he says, such as bird waste and raw sewage that gets to the lake after heavy rains.
HENDERSON: I wouldn’t swim in the lake (laughing). I wouldn’t.
In its latest report, the NRDC put Illinois first among states with beaches having water samples exceeding acceptable levels of bacteria, such as E. coli. Indiana ranked 4th. But, badgered by reporters, Henderson admitted Illinois and the city of Chicago do much more regular testing of beaches, something other states do not do enough of or not at all. That could skew those rankings.
Complicating things further, Henderson says the federal standards the city must follow to measure lake bacteria are outdated. His group is calling for tougher federal standards for the testing of beach waters.
HENDERSON: This is not a jam on the city. It’s recognition that we’ve got a significant environmental problem that can present a problem to the public health and safety and we need to deal with it.
But Ellen Sargent, deputy director of the Chicago Park District’s Department of Natural Resources, says it appears the NRDC may be needlessly scaring beachgoers into thinking the water is not safe.
SARGENT: The lakefront and our beaches are such an important part of Chicago. In the last couple of years, we really aggressively done as much as we can to keep that e-coli and bacteria out of the water.
Sargent says the city is out testing each beach several times a week for contamination of E. coli. In fact, beaches closings are down this season.
SARGENT: We’re out there. We test every single one of our 23 beaches in Chicago five days a week and on Saturdays and Sundays when necessary.
Sargent takes exception to some of the NRDC’s data used in the report, which she says were interpreted incorrectly. She says for example, the group got it wrong when it listed one Northside beach as the worst in the city for high bacteria levels. She says the group never contacted her office to double-check its data. Sargent says she plans to review the entire report to see if there are other mistakes.
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