BY DAVID STEINKRAUS
Journal Times | Posted: Sunday, June 1, 2008 12:00 am
RACINE - What the state and federal officials were excited about Friday morning were a few pieces of paper. It's hard to make that exciting, and the officials at a press conference worked hard to do that, but what is important is the results which those pieces of paper produced.
Together the few pieces of paper make up survey forms which allow beach managers to home in on sources of water pollution. On Friday, Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator in the Office of Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was in Racine to release the survey form as a standard tool for use at beaches around the Great Lakes and across the nation. Such a survey was critical in helping Racine to solve its beach problems.
"It wasn't so long ago that Racine's North Beach was struggling," said Alderman David Maack, president of the City Council. In 2000, there were a record number of beach closures or swimming advisories because of bacterial contamination which no one knew the source of, he said.
The survey helped fix that. Once it knew where problems originated, the city formulated solutions such as a wetland to filter stormwater running off streets and regrading the beaches to eliminate pools of water that dampen sand and encourage the growth of bacteria.
Nor was the form an original idea, said Julie Kinzelman, a microbiologist at the city Health Department. She drew many compliments Friday for her work to pinpoint and solve contamination.
"It's not like Racine's bright light bulb came on and nobody else had this great idea," she said. The city's survey form was developed with funding from the SC Johnson Fund, and the same idea had been used before to investigate pollution in shellfish waters, she said.
What the survey does, she said, is to help people think systematically about where contamination might be coming from. So the form asks how turbid the water is, whether algae is present and its color, whether there are waves, how many people are in the water, whether there is floating debris and what types of birds might be present.
In the past three years, she said, city beaches have been open at least 95 percent of the time. Last year, there were only three days on which swimming was discouraged.
The survey has proved its worth in testing. Last year, the EPA provided about $500,000 to test the survey at 61 beaches around the lakes, in both the United States and Ontario. In 2006, 84 percent of the contamination sources were listed as unknown, said Gary Gulezian, director of the EPA's Great Lakes national program office. At the end of the 2007 beach season, only 24 percent of contamination sources remained unknown.
Of the sources that were identified, slightly more than half were linked to wet weather, 26 percent were associated with waves, 15 percent with turbidity, 10 percent with birds and 9 percent with algae. That's a big deal, he said, because knowledge of what the problem is allows people to fix it.
It has generally been a good week for the lakes, said Todd Ambs, water administrator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. It began with the governor signing the Great Lakes Compact which, if it gains ultimate approval, will help conserve water and govern withdrawals of water, and it ended with a focus on beach water improvements.
The federal law for future improvements is now under review. The Beach Act, which has provided funds for water monitoring and notifying the public about problems, is in Congress for reauthorization. Congress is considering widening the uses for the money, Grumbles said, and will be changed to recognize the change in science and updated tools such as the survey form. From the EPA's perspective, the act has been immensely successful, he said.
Funding to support beach work has remained constant for the past few years at about $10 million, he said. On Friday, federal officials also presented a symbolic check for $222,420, which is the state's 2008 share of Beach Act money.
Anyone in Wisconsin knows that the state, or the federal government, would have trouble coming up with extra money, Ambs said. But we might not need to if we do a better job of targeting what money we have, he said.
"That's the exciting thing about it, is that if we actually are smart about it and learn what we're doing and engage local folks in this, you can to a lot with a limited amount of money."
On The Net
If you want to find out more about Wisconsin beaches, visit the state beach health page where you can find out about the conditions at your local beach and sign up for e-mail alerts about beach water quality. The Web site's address is
http://www.wibeaches.us
Beach Numbers
* Racine beach advisories: 2007, 3; 2006, 3; 2005, 5; 2004, 24.
* National beach data: Beaches monitored, 3,602; beaches affected by advisories or closings, 1,167.
* For all eight Great Lakes states, beaches were open during 94 percent of days in the season.
* In 2007, Illinois beaches were available on 83 percent of days, the lowest number for the eight states.
* Pennsylvania's beaches were open 98 percent of days, highest for the lakes states.
* Wisconsin's beaches were open 93 percent of days.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency