Chicago Park District questions group's finding on poor water quality at beaches

Water quality at Chicago area beaches is the worst for swimming compared with all other areas in the U.S., according to 2007 data compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council and released Tuesday.

But, Chicago Park District officials criticized the study, saying they found several errors in the data.

"The first concern is just the way that [NRDC is] taking all of this very raw data and putting it into their own charts and their own formulas," said Ellen Sargent, the park district's deputy director in the department of natural resources.

An NRDC official conceded one possible error in the data for Kathy Osterman Beach in the North Side's Edgewater community.

The survey by the NRDC measured water quality at beaches nationwide, with Osterman and other Chicago beaches ranking among the worst.

"I wouldn't swim in the lake," said Henry Henderson, Director of NRDC's Midwest branch, at a news conferences Tuesday.

NRDC's study notes that Osterman beach exceeded national bacteria standards 100 percent of the time last year. In freshwater, the limit set by the national Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act of 2000, is 235 E. coli forming units per 100 ml.

But while bacterial contamination in the Great Lakes has previously been documented, local officials disputed the accuracy of some NRDC's numbers.

In particular park district officials argued that Osterman Beach is not as bad as the NRDC's research makes it out to be.

Indeed, "We certainly do not dispute the fact that if the park district says that it is incorrect that it may have been entered incorrectly," said NRDC's Midwest branch spokesman Josh Mogerman. He explained that the data they used in their study matches the data quantified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Other alleged discrepancies found by the park district in the NRDC study include a mistake in the monitoring frequency at Montrose Beach; the study states that Uptown's Montrose Beach bacteria levels are measured once a week when they are really checked five times a week.

All Chicago beaches are checked daily or five times a week, park district officials stressed.

Sargent argued that NRDC "is not comparing apples to apples." Illinois monitors their swimming water quality more frequently than other states, so comparing Illinois data to other states' data is a "completely biased comparison" that NRDC "keeps doing every single year," Sargent said.

Sargent spoke highly of the aggressive progress that the park district has made to improve swimming water quality. This swim season, there have been no swim bans and only three swim advisories, Sargent said.

One anti-pollution program that seems to be working very well for the park district's beaches, according to Sargent, is the Border Collie program. She said the dogs have chased away birds - especially ring-billed gulls - from beaches at 63rd and 67th streets from dawn until dusk on every beach day this year.

Despite this progress, there is still a lot of work to be done to improve water quality in the Great Lakes, she said.

"We believe it is much more of a regional problem that requires much more of a Midwest focus," said John Paul Jones, director of neighborhood parks and community relations for Chicago's Friends of the Park. "Our lakefront beaches are used much more than any others in the U.S."