SJ, I am helping Surfrider with their coliforms testing, and I have been in touch with CBA, CDLAB, LakeWatch, and other local interest groups regarding testing. In a perfect world, the health department would conduct these tests weekly on all of the public swimming areas at coastal dune lakes, but that is an expensive endeavor for them to undertake. Surfrider has not established a sampling protocol (once per month) yet. We simply did a couple of preliminary samples at two of the heavily used lakes to see what kind of results we came up with. We will be watching rain events, water temperatures, etc. to determine future testing protocols, but tests will be done only on lakes with public accesses. Other lakes, not so accessible to the public, may be added if homeowner groups or CBA or LakeWatch would like to pay a minimal price for testing (cost of supplies). We are currently doing our own lab work in order to make this testing affordable, and if we find a problem, we will contact the health department to follow up and/or send samples out to another lab. We will also be providing our data to CBA and LakeWatch. Although these samples could be pulled by CBA volunteers, they must be collected in sterile containers and by particular methods to avoid contamination of the sample, and they must be processed very quickly. Having Surfrider volunteers collect the samples allows us to be responsible for the collection methods and also gives us more flexibility to collect samples quickly afer a big rain event, for example, and to get samples processed quickly. Ultimately, we're just trying to help out, and CBA was happy to have a group that could do the coliform testing. It has been on their wish list for a while, but it is rather expensive to have a commercial lab run the tests, and their budget is limited. We would appreciate any input on potential problem locations, sampling protocol, etc. Send me a PM with any info that may be helpful to us. Thanks!
