Bath Township’s Park Lake Beach is open to the public again after being closed due to high E. coli levels.
The beach was closed to the public in mid-June when conditions were deemed unsafe for swimming.
When the water was tested in June, levels of E. coli exceeded 300 per 100 millimeters of water. In the past week, the 30-day Mean is 86.44 per 100 millimeters of water and the Daily Mean is 39.87 per 100 millimeters of water — both under action levels.
The Mid-Michigan District Health Department lifted the advisory, and Bath Township reopened the beach on July 30.
MMDHD Health Officer Liz Braddock says they had to take into consideration a 30-day average where the levels were safe for the public.
“We’ve had at least two sets of samples that shows that the monitoring at the beach was acceptable for swimming again and being in contact with the water.”
Braddock’s team took samples for DNA source tracking purposes when the beach first closed, but won’t receive results for another month.
Although the direct source of the contamination is not yet known, Braddock says Bath Township has implemented several measures to improve the E. coli levels.
“They started raking the beach daily, and they already had some advisories saying to not feed the wild fowl at the beach. Mitigation ideas came to mind which is what they did, and it worked and the results came down.”
Bath Township also had the help of the Park Lake Advisory Board and Friends of Park Lake to deter geese from the beach area, an effort to help improve the water quality.
MMDHD will continue testing the water weekly until Labor Day.
To view collection results, visit the BeachGuard Website.
McKoy's story is brought to you as part of a partnership between WKAR and Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.
