Do you know where it’s safe to swim on the Coosa River?
Summer is just around the bend which means that pretty soon folks will begin jumping into their favorite swimming holes around the Coosa! Check out Coosa Riverkeeper’s website or social media every Friday to see the latest water quality results each week of the summer, starting the week before Memorial Day, for our summer Swim Guide program so that you and your family can make informed decisions on where it’s safe to swim.
Swim Guide is our organization’s water quality monitoring alert service that we conduct each summer since 2015! Samples are collected from all around the watershed, delivered to our office lab, processed and analyzed, and then we issue alerts based on the E. coli levels we detected in our samples. We issue these alerts using a simple green, yellow, or red indicator meaning that if we detect elevated levels of E. coli in the waterway above the safe swimming limit for humans, we issue a yellow or red alert depending on how high the E. coli is elevated in a particular sample.
We’ve got a great team of Environmental Technicians this year that are all ready to gather this important water quality data across 50 sampling sites. Our Environmental Technicians play a vital role in conducting this program as they serve as our “boots on the ground” and process these samples for staff to report to the public on Fridays. We hope we see y’all out on the river this summer, and give a wave if you see one of our Environmental Technicians out and about around the river!
No one should have to gamble with their health when it comes to splashing in the river! That’s why we conduct this program each year, every week of the summer, so that you and your community can make informed decisions on where you choose to recreate. Check out where we test and learn more about what our data means by following our social media or visiting our website at CoosaRiver.org/SwimGuide!
LEARN MORE AT COOSARIVER.ORG/SwimGuide
