More communities along the Great Lakes are testing their beaches and fighting over who’s to blame for beach closings. One dispute along Lake Michigan involves the performance of a multi-billion dollar sewage system in Milwaukee. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
More communities along the Great Lakes are testing their beaches and fighting over who’s to blame for beach closings. One dispute along Lake Michigan involves the performance of a multi-billion dollar sewage system in Milwaukee. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Some Illinois Congress people have asked the EPA to stop Milwaukee from dumping sewage into Lake Michigan. The politicians say a major sewage tunnel installed in Milwaukee a decade ago still allows too much untreated material into the water. They argue that city sewage is to blame for a sizable increase in Illinois beach closings over the last few years. But Val Klump of the Great Lakes Water Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says the local sewer tunnel has greatly reduced the number of sewer overflows.
“Now that’s not to say we’re content with allowing any kind of untreated material getting into our waterways. That’s not our goal.”
But Klump says given other factors like dilution and other bacterial sources like gull droppings and pet waste, it’s less likely that Milwaukee wastewater is fouling beaches fifty miles south.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.