Grand Bend Rotary Coordinates Beach Water Testing for 5th Year

WHAT A WONDERFUL SUMMER FOR SWIMMING IN GRAND BEND

If you go down to the main Grand Bend beach between 8:00 and 9:00 am most weekday mornings you will see people in blue t-shirts out in the water near shore with long poles and bottles. What are they doing?

They are volunteers doing water sampling in order to make the beach safer for your swimming pleasure. Also in order to keep the prestigious Blue Flag accreditation, the water quality must meet the Ontario safe swimming standard which is less than 100 units of E.coli (Escherichia coli) per 100 millilitres of water on at least 80 percent of the tests taken.

For the past 5 years, as part of a partnership effort between Rotary’s Clean Water Now committee and the municipality of Lambton Shores, the main Grand Bend Beach is tested most weekdays by one of the 15 volunteers shown below. The testers must wade into the lake at 5 locations on the Grand Bend beach to take water samples - rain or shine. These are then sent by Lambton Shores to a lab in London for E.coli testing. The Lambton County Department of Health does this function normally on Mondays but the local volunteers do this procedure the other weekdays during the main swimming season from June until Labour day in order to permit the beach to stay open for more swimming days. Although this program is coordinated by the Rotary’s Grand Bend Clean Water Now committee, about half the volunteers are non-Rotarians.