Before transferring to MSU from Grand Valley State University, Melissa Rumrill spent much of her time at one of the most popular state tourist destinations: Lake Michigan.
The supply chain management sophomore would make the trip from Allendale to the second largest Great Lake up to four times a week during the first weeks of school.
“That’s everyone’s favorite thing to do when the weather’s warm at Grand Valley,” she said.
Keeping the Great Lakes clean is an important task because dirty water will keep beachgoers away, Rumrill said.
“College kids do some pretty gross things, but swimming in polluted water isn’t one of them,” she said. “Plus, it takes away from the beauty.”
According to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Michigan is keeping its beaches and the Great Lakes relatively clean.
Beach closings and pollution warnings in Michigan decreased in 2006, but closings for the Great Lakes region increased by 10 percent, the report said. The closings and health advisory days occurred 124 times in the state in 2006 – a 47 percent decline from 2005.
Beaches are closed when unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria are found in the water. The bacteria can cause skin irritation, intestinal sickness and diarrhea.
Abby Rubley, spokeswoman for Environment Michigan, said the drop in beach closings occurred because the state is going through a moderate drought.
“It’s kind of a false success,” she said.
Less rain means older sewers built to handle storm water and sewage don’t overflow and run into surrounding rivers that feed into the Great Lakes, Rubley said.
“They can’t handle heavy rains,” she said. “They can only take in as much as the system can handle, the rest they have to bypass.”
Christy McGillivray, senior organizer for Clean Water Action Michigan, said the state’s aging sewer system has improved thanks to state and federal aid.
Since 1989, the state has given communities nearly $2.4 billion for the construction, expansion and upgrade of state sewers. And the 2002 passage of the Great Lakes Water Quality Bond referendum brought an additional $1 billion to the state’s sewer funding.
But much work still remains, McGillivray said.
Between 2000-01, 52 billion gallons of raw, untreated sewage was dumped in the Great Lakes, McGillivray said.
“It’s one of those things that until you have sewage bubbling up into our basement, you don’t think about it,” she said.
Pete Ostlund, field operations chief for the Water Quality Bureau at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said the state is making progress in its fight against pollution entering the Great Lakes.
In 2006, 13 of the state’s 46 combined sewer systems released untreated water, Ostlund said.
“The problem with combined sewer overflow systems is fixing them takes a lot of time and money,” he said. “We’re way ahead of most other states.”
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Joan Rose, co-director for the MSU Center for Water Sciences, said the number of beach closings may have increased in other Great Lakes states because those states’iu shorelines are more industrial than Michigan’s.
Changing environmental conditions also affects pollutant levels.
Lower water levels expose more underwater plant life, such as algae, to sunlight which can increase E. coli levels, Rose said. Invasive species, such as zebra mussels, also contribute to changing the Great Lakes ecosystem.
“You have a different kind of environment that wasn’t there before,” she said.
