Update 2020-06-04: Sunday and Monday creek and river water quality results.

I’ve posted green for “Meets water quality standards” on Swim Guide all the way from Cook County Boat Ramp (GA 76) on the Little River for last weekend, and the same past State Line Boat Ramp into Florida for late last week. With little rain lately and none forecast, this clean trend should continue.

Folsom Bridge (GA 122) in Swim Guide

These water samples look clean. And this time that water was clean.

Samples

Zero E. coli at Knights Ferry and Nankin Boat Ramps, and very little fecal coliform of any kind, in these Petrifilms by WWALS tester Suzy Hall from her samples of Saturday, May 30, 2020.

Plates

Clean weekend
For context, including the entire WWALS composite water quality table of results from both Georgia and Florida, see wwals.net/issues/testing/.

Upstream at Cook County Boat Ramp (GA 76) and Folsom Bridge (GA 122) on the Little River, I got 0 and 66 cfu/100 mL, and another 66 at Hagan Bridge (GA 122) on the Withlacoochee River. Those are well below the 126 longterm average limit, so green it is for Swim Guide.

Clean week

For last Thursday, Madison Health also got very clean reasults from State Line to FL 6.

We don’t have any new results from Valdosta since Monday a week ago.

Odd Valdosta Fecal coliform

That day and the preceding Friday, Valdosta got oddly very high Fecal coliform results while their E. coli results the same days and places were quite low. I don’t know what that means.

However, since we go by E. coli, still green it was then.

Florida sampling locations

The above map is where the various Florida agencies sample. The red dots indicate FDEP’s monthly trend sampling locations. The green discs are places the agencies sample after spills.

The only Florida agency currently sampling is Madison Health. I don’t know why a local county health department should have to pay to do the state of Florida’s job. Also, nobody knows the water quality of the Withlacoochee or Suwannee Rivers downstream from FL 6, because nobody is testing there.

Maybe you’d like to contact your Florida elected officials and ask them to get FDEP to implement thrice-weekly river sampling all the way to the Gulf, like Valdosta is doing all the way to the GA-FL line.

 -jsq, John S. Quarterman, Suwannee RIVERKEEPER®

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