The English River Watershed Management Authority has begun testing E. Coli levels in the watershed.

Twenty-one monitoring locations were tested from June to December of 2017. The highest level of E. Coli collected in Washington County was at the Highway 22 bridge at Lime Creek, east of Wellman. The minimum number of colony-forming units, or CFUs, per 100 mL was 840. The Iowa Administrative Code states 235 CFUs per 100mL is the benchmark for posing a health risk to humans recreating in the water. One CFU per 100 mL is the amount in which drinking water must be disinfected for consumption.

Project Coordinator for ERWMA Jody Bailey gives insight, “It’s really important to remember a couple of things about 2017. It was kind of an anomaly, it was an extremely dry year, borderline drought in this part of Iowa. We can’t really draw any conclusions about what these numbers are telling us. It’s really important to take it in context that this is one summer and fall season of data. We need to have continuous monitoring year after year after year in order for us to identify what our true numbers are, what our true patterns are.”

According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources the 90th percentile of 14,869 samples taken during 2000-2016 across the state have shown 2,000 CFUs, while several sites in the English River Watershed have shown 24,000. Bailey says E. Coli comes from different sources including animal feedlots, leaking septic systems, or animal carcass dumpage, “At the watershed we’re much more focused on what we can do to help resolve the issues in our watershed than we are looking to place blame, because bottom line is we’re all contributing to the problems in the watershed.”

ERWMA will be performing the next round of E. Coli testing in March-November this year.