(Wahpeton)– Crews with Lakeside Lab and the Cooperative Lakes Area Monitoring Program, or CLAMP, are collecting and analyzing water samples from the Iowa Great Lakes. Lakeside Lab Executive Director Mary Skopec outlines some of the results from West Lake Okoboji…
“We had a group of volunteers go down essentially the center of West Okoboji in the deeper water areas, and those samples do not have high levels of bacteria. They were actually fairly low, elevated from background which is basically no bacteria, but still pretty low. And then we had some other staff take samples in the flooded beach areas around West Okoboji and those samples were actually quite high with bacteria. So we know that those flooded beach areas where we had a lot of sediment and things kind of coming off the land into the lake actually brought a lot of bacteria with it. And of course we’ve had those sewage overflows. So those near shore areas seem to be fairly high with bacteria but the deeper water areas seem to be a lot lower.”
Skopec recommends everyone stay out of the lakes for now…
“Until that water clears up a bit, the bacteria levels are probably not what you want to be swimming in. And we know that murky water tends to hold on to bacteria longer so we really need for all of the dirt and junk to settle to the bottom of the lake, have a couple of sunny days to really essentially disinfect that water, make sure that we’re not having any sewer bypasses into the lake as well, and the last thing I would say too is really we have a lot of debris in the water so if you’re swimming near shore, you’ve got bacteria, you’ve got debris from docks and from things that have fallen into the water. You can’t see as well so you don’t know that those things are in the water. It’s really smart to stay out of those especially near shore areas.”
Skopec adds they’re seeing extensive algae blooms as well on all of the lakes. She says some of those are toxic, and that it’s especially important for humans and dogs not to come into contact with that. When it comes to the debris in the water, Skopec says it likely is going to be a very lengthy process to get it retrieved…
“Because some of the stuff has sunk to the bottom of the lake, we’re going to need some pretty significant diving efforts to retrieve things that have sunk to the bottom of the lakes. So stay tuned, I would say for that. There will definitely be an effort. I don’t think anybody’s quite at that point yet.”
Circling back to water testing, Skopec says they’re in the process of analyzing samples from East Lake Okoboji and Big Spirit Lake and will be posting those results on the Lakeside Lab Facebook page.
You can listen to our interview with Mary Skopec here:
