Belle Isle water prompts concern
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Belle Isle water prompts concern
Group wants to monitor beach's pollution levels
Jim Lynch / The Detroit News
There isn't much that's tropical about Krystale Houston's West Detroit neighborhood so, for her, the beach at Belle Isle Park is a real escape. In the summers, she and her friends try to get there every other day or so for swimming and sunning.
"I come here to get away," said the 24-year-old on a warm Monday afternoon. "Since we don't have any real beaches we can come out here and pretend. It's beautiful and the water is free."
But depending on which public beach you're talking about in Metro Detroit, that water gets varying levels of attention from health officials charged with ensuring it's safe to swim in. And while surrounding governments have compiled years of data on their beaches -- telling them which times are most likely to produce E.coli contamination -- Detroit's only public beach at Belle Isle has never been monitored regularly.
It wasn't until researchers from the University of Michigan tested the water in 2005 that E.coli levels high enough to cause concern were discovered along Belle Isle. Those findings were shared with Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice.
The environmental group is dissatisfied with the city's handling of Belle Isle's beach and is preparing to put its own muscle behind an effort to level that playing field. Group members believe city residents should have the same protections as suburban residents and are organizing a team of volunteers to perform regular water testing at Belle Isle.
Five of the organization's interns will be trained in water sampling on June 23, and as many as 25 volunteers will be trained in July. Testing crews will turn their samples over to researchers at Wayne State University for analysis and the results will be posted on the organization's Web site.
According to records collected by Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality, the beach at the city park has never been tested with regularity. There are no state laws requiring regular testing of public beaches, however some government agencies clearly give monitoring for E.coli bacteria a higher priority than others.
For the last half century, the Macomb County Health Department has been testing its public beaches twice a week. Any results requiring the department to shut down the beach area to swimming are immediately posted on the county's Web site.
Oakland County typically monitors as many as 60 public beach/swimming areas with the help of a team of student interns. Those students sample water at each site once a week. This year, however, budget constraints mean the county will cut its monitoring load by half.
Water sampling records are tracked by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
City officials "have indicated that they do monitoring, but they've also indicated that they don't have the capacity to provide that information to the public," said Donelle Wilkins, executive director of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice. "... We want to make certain that the public, those who swim at Belle Isle beach who aren't always able to get out to Kensington Metropark or Metro Beach, gets the same kind of information."
Donald Hamel, environmental health services administrator for Detroit's Health and Wellness Promotion Department, said the city plans to continue sampling this year and he offered several reasons as to why the testing began in 2008.
"It was really the state... there was state money available and then a decision by our department to go ahead and do [[the testing) and get paid for it," he said. "We were always reluctant. I don't really have a good rationale why we didn't. We talked about it, but we never started doing it."
Some beaches in Metro Detroit, such as Blossom Heath in St. Clair Shores, are magnets for E.coli contamination because of their location and the configuration of the shoreline.
Belle Isle is a completely different animal. Situated in the middle of the Detroit River away from the shores on both sides, water moves along the island's beach area at a fairly rapid pace -- meaning any contamination that arrives there won't stay long.
Yet Belle Isle has its own problems, including a plentiful supply of geese and seagulls. Fecal waste from birds, particularly after rains, can lead to contamination.
The two months of sampling conducted last year at Belle Isle had four individual E.coli readings above acceptable levels. While a single reading over acceptable levels is not enough to close a beach to swimmers, officials with Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice said city residents deserve the same kind of water monitoring as their suburban counterparts.
jlynch@detnews.com [[313) 222-2034
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© Copyright 2008 The Detroit News. All rights reserved.
Let me guess, it must be the truck traffic going to the Ambassador Bridge?
On the real, the City of Detroit's Environmental Affairs Department needs to get on this. MDEQ and the County as well, if they're authorized to.
