It’s hard to believe, but we have already completed the last week of RiverWatch for the summer. Thank you so much to all the volunteers that helped us collect samples, we couldn’t have done this without you.
All of our numbers come from the previous week since our last sampling date was August 16th. While our numbers are from last week, they are still a good indicator of how clean our water is. Our last sampling week was another relatively clean one. Once again there was very little precipitation before we took our samples, so that could be a reason for the consistently low numbers we’ve seen this summer.
One of our sites exceeded both the shellfishing and swimming standard in the same week for the first time. The Julian Street Bridge had 39cfu per 100ml for fecal coliform and 120cfu per 100ml for enterococcus. The state set standards are 14cfu per 100ml for fecal coliform and 104 cfu per 100ml for enterococcus which are the shellfishing and swimming standard respectively. Damon’s Point and the Keville Footbridge are the only other sites that exceeded the state’s standards. Damon’s Point had 27cfu per 100ml for fecal coliform and the Keville Footbridge had 200cfu per 100ml for enterococcus.
Unfortunately we won’t be able to see how this recent rain would affect the numbers we’ve been getting for the summer, but hopefully our rivers remain clean. Continue to go out and enjoy the water while the warm weather tries to stick around, and we will be back next year to continue monitoring the watershed.