Summer’s here and Iowans are hitting the beaches. Dan Kendall, senior environmental specialist with the Iowa DNR, says there’s a whole crew of people who are spending the season testing the water quality in our many lakes, some 246 of them.
“We have staff that run out and collect samples during the week pretty much across the entire state of Iowa,” Kendall says, “and then that data gets analyzed, and then we get it back for Friday uploads to our beach monitoring website.” While “no swimming” advisories have already been issued for a few locations in the state, Kendall says that’s not unusual.
“I would say it’s pretty typical,” Kendall says. “Algal toxins are a little on the slow end, which is good. We’ve only had a couple of hits on that. The indicator for bacteria seems to be tracking about what it normally does for a given season.” Kendall says it’s a snap to find the latest beach and lake condition reports on the agency’s website, IowaDNR.gov.
“The easiest thing to do is go on there and we have a little search box that you can type in ‘beaches,’ and that will take you to our old beach page,” he says, “which we’ve just updated to a new website, so we haven’t got all of our links squared away yet, but that page has a link to the brand new website.”
Those lake condition reports are issued every Friday throughout the summer.
(By Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)