How staying ‘up-to-date' with water quality at Burlington beaches can keep you safe
Beach-swimming water is reportedly tested several times a day to determine the safety-level of beaches. The Swim-Water Updates Page is a live PDF that 'covers all public-health related beach closures from Cyanobacteria blooms and elevated E. coli levels,' according to the Department's webpage.
Oakledge Park set to host 'first-ever' concessions vendor
From Memorial Day Through Labor Day, beaches are inspected for E. Coli and Cyanobacteria blooms, the ladder of which can release toxins and poisons that are hazardous to human health.
During the season E.Coli testing occurs bi-weekly, while Cyanobacteria testing happens daily.
Additional information on category warnings and closures and be found on the department's website, as well as the Swim-Water Update Page. On Facebook, they remind people to 'Check before you go!'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
When is the first day of school in Delaware? Peek at your school district's calendar
Almost time to get up for school. Many Delaware public schools will be opening their doors by the end of August — with that last Friday off for a long Labor Day weekend — or within the first week of September. So get those supplies together. Remember to shuffle through drawers to find what you don't need to buy again. Plan your route to the bus stop or drop-off. Check whether your school already has an open house, orientation or block party on the books. And, of course, be ready to take those first-day-of-school photos. We have mapped out when the first day of school will fall for Delaware school districts: Brandywine — Monday, Aug. 25 The first Monday in August will be the first day for Brandywine's first to sixth grades, freshmen and high school seniors, according to the district calendar. It also serves as kindergarten orientation day, though times vary across schools. By the following day, Tuesday, Aug. 26, all K-12 students report to school. And preschool gets things started the next Tuesday, Sept. 2. ICYMI: Early August is also packed with new family orientations, meet-and-greets, school take-a-peek nights and more. Colonial — Monday, Aug. 25 Monday will be the first day for kindergarteners, sixth grade and high school freshmen, as Colonial begins a slightly staggered start. By the following Tuesday, Aug. 26, all students must follow suit. Preschool will start after Labor Day, come Sept. 2. Laurel — Monday, Aug. 25 Monday will welcome all kindergarten and second graders, as well as fifth, seventh and ninth grades in Laurel School District. Then, the following day will then bring in all pre-K to high school students across the Sussex County system. New Castle County Vo-Tech — Monday, Aug. 25 Vo-Tech's first week of school will also come at a staggered start. By the last Monday in August, just high school freshman and seniors will attend. Then, Tuesday will see only sophomores and juniors, while seniors see asynchronous learning. Everyone is due to school by Wednesday. POLYTECH — Monday, Aug. 25 This last August Monday will be the first school day for all students at POLYTECH High School. There's also a "9th Grade Academy" event for freshman on Aug. 21. Taxes: How are your taxes changing in New Castle County? Delaware schools take reassessment boosts Red Clay Consolidated — Monday, Aug. 25 Monday will mark the first day of school for Red Clay's Early Years Program, first to sixth graders, as well as high school freshmen. Come Tuesday, everyone reports to school. Kindergarteners get a staggered start, with last names A-L coming Monday and Tuesday, while M-Z kick things off Wednesday, Thursday. Seaford — Wednesday, Aug. 27 The last Wednesday in August marks Day No. 1 for just pre-K, kindergarten, third, sixth and ninth grade. By the following day, Aug. 28, all students should be reporting for duty in Seaford. Sussex Technical — Tuesday, Aug. 26 On the Sussex County Vocational Technical school calendar, Monday Aug. 25 will open doors to just freshmen. Then, they can expect all other high school students to join the ranks once they've settled in, the following day. Woodbridge — Monday, Aug. 25 Freshman will see their first day of school Monday, on Woodbridge's calendar, joined by grades first to sixth and the first half of kindergarteners. The next day, Aug. 26, will see seventh and eighth grades, alongside the rest of high school students, head to class. By Wednesday, Aug. 27, the second half of kindergarteners will report. Delmar — Thursday, Aug. 28 The last week in August brings a couple back-to-school nights for high school and middle school, while a "transition day" is planned for only fifth grade and high school freshman to report to school on Thursday, Aug. 28. Then by September's first Tuesday, Sept. 2, all grades must report from the beach. Milford — Tuesday, Sept. 2 Milford has the first Tuesday of September on the calendar for first day of school for all students, K-12. Lake Forest — Tuesday, Sept. 2 Lake Forest is hosting a half-day "transition day" for kindergarten, fourth and sixth grades, as well as high school freshman Thursday, Aug. 28 — while all other grades report the next week, on Sept. 2, to mark the first day of school for all grades. Caesar Rodney — Tuesday, Sept. 2 With the last week of August packing in various teacher development, Tuesday, Sept. 2, will mark the first day of school for Caesar Rodney students. Appoquinimink — Tuesday, Sept. 2 The last week in August will offer opportunities for new parent orientation, freshman open houses, meet-the-teacher events and more, per Appo's calendar. Then, Appoquinimink is getting things started with a first day of school on the first Tuesday of September for grades first to ninth, alongside kindergarteners with last names starting with A to L. The next day, Sept. 3, will welcome the rest, as well as just kindergarteners with last names from M to Z. The next Monday will bring in preschool. New schools: Major school projects across Delaware see funding from final legislative push Capital — Tuesday, Sept. 2 The first September Tuesday will mark the first day of school for Capital's kindergarten through sixth graders, as well as high school freshman. The remaining high schoolers will stagger by one day, heading to school by Wednesday, Sept. 3. Preschool starts the next Monday, Sept. 8, according to the calendar. Christina — Tuesday, Sept. 2 Wednesday, Sept. 3, will welcome Christina's grades one to six, alongside high school freshman, and an orientation for kindergarten. The first day of school for the rest of K-12 comes the next day. The next Monday, Sept. 8, marks the first day for preschools. Indian River — Tuesday, Sept. 2 Grades kindergarten, sixth grade and high school freshman, alongside the Howard T. Ennis school, start out the school year for Indian River on Tuesday. Then, the first day for the rest of K-12 comes Wednesday. However, preschool will begin the following Monday, Sep. 8. Smyrna — Tuesday, Sept. 2 This first Tuesday in September will mark the first pupil day for kindergarten to high school freshman in Smyrna, while sophomores, juniors and seniors start asynchronous for that day. Then, per the calendar, the remaining students and early childhood pupils report the following day. Cape Henlopen — Wednesday, Sept. 3 After multiple Meet The Teacher nights and more, the first Wednesday in September is set to be the first day for students to report back to Cape Henlopen school. ICYMI: Delaware joins suit against Trump administration for $6.8 billion in frozen education funds Have a story? Contact Kelly Powers at kepowers@ or (231) 622-2191, and follow her on Twitter @kpowers01. This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Almost that time: When is Delaware's first day of school? Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Efforts to reduce toxic algae in Lake Erie appear to be making progress. Now they face budget cuts
Photo of a 2009 algal bloom in Lake Erie | NASA This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. Cuts to a major water-quality program in Ohio's biennial budget will likely weaken efforts to control the spread of toxic blue-green algae in Lake Erie. The program in question, H2Ohio, has invested millions of dollars in improving water quality throughout the state. Much of that money has gone toward cutting off the supply of nutrients to the aforementioned algae, also known as cyanobacteria, which bloom in massive quantities every summer. The new state budget, which Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law on July 1, drastically cuts funding for those efforts. Large blooms of cyanobacteria cause problems for pretty much everything that isn't algae. They block sunlight and create aquatic 'dead zones' where there isn't enough dissolved oxygen for other organisms to survive. They also release toxins that pose significant health risks to humans, especially to people with pre-existing conditions. David Kennedy, a professor of medicine at the University of Toledo, described a case of a 7-year-old girl with asthma who was exposed to cyanobacteria while swimming in Maumee Bay. 'Her asthma was exacerbated to the point where she needed to be intubated and had a very long, complicated stay in our medical center,' Kennedy said. The girl did eventually recover. By reducing the nutrients entering the lake each year, scientists and environmental stewards hope to limit how big the algal blooms get. The main culprit is phosphorus, a key component in agricultural fertilizers, both commercially produced and via manure. 'Whenever it rains, that water goes into the soil, it dissolves the phosphorus just like your sugar in a coffee, and then that water leaves the field carrying the dissolved phosphorus,' said Chris Winslow, director of the Ohio Sea Grant College Program at the Ohio State University. Some of that water finds its way to the Maumee River, then into western Lake Erie, where the phosphorus it carries becomes food for cyanobacteria. The more phosphorus the Maumee brings into the lake, the bigger the bloom that year. Nathan Manning of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Ohio's Heidelberg University said as of June 16 this year, researchers had measured 227 metric tons of dissolved phosphorus flowing out of the Maumee. That puts the likely total for the summer around 235 to 273 metric tons. 'The target … for dissolved reactive phosphorus is 240 metric tons. So there's a good chance that we will stay below or right at that target, which is good news,' Manning said. Winslow said that's a sign everyone's efforts are paying off, though he cautioned that it's impossible to say for sure unless those efforts are scaled back. 'We assume these things are doing great jobs to trap nutrients, but the only way you know is to stop doing it. So if we go next year, and see that the dissolved phosphorus goes up and these programs are no longer there, it's a good indication that they were working,' Winslow said. With the cuts to H2Ohio, that proof may come sooner rather than later. Since its inception in 2019, the program has tackled the phosphorus problem in two ways: by incentivizing farmers to change their practices, and by funding the construction and maintenance of wetlands. On the agricultural side, the Ohio Department of Agriculture uses H2Ohio money to help farmers limit how much fertilizer runs off their fields. That includes testing soil to determine how much fertilizer a farmer should apply in the first place, as well as training on things like manure management and overwinter cover crops. Thanks to H2Ohio, farmers don't have to pay for those changes themselves. Wetland management, which falls under the purview of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, plays an equally important role. When water passes through a wetland, the plants there act as natural filters, absorbing some of the nutrients before they reach a larger river or lake. Under the new budget, the Department of Agriculture's yearly H2Ohio budget is going from $60.8 million to $53.6 million. The Department of Natural Resources is getting hit even harder: Its H2Ohio budget is dropping from $46.6 million to $21.2 million. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency also gets H2Ohio dollars, mostly to protect drinking water; its budget is falling from $27.5 million to just $7.5 million. Nate Schlater, senior director of ecological restoration at the environmental and economic development nonprofit Rural Action, is overseeing the construction of a new wetland near the Auglaize River in northwestern Ohio, which feeds into the Maumee. He and his team are using H2Ohio dollars for the project. The land was previously owned by a farmer, who sold it to Rural Action because it was prone to flooding. Constructing could mean various things depending on the wetland. In some cases, it may be necessary to redirect where a stream flows. In the Auglaize project, the team discovered three cars buried along the stream bank in an effort to control erosion, which will have to be removed. After that, there's seeding the appropriate plants and ensuring nothing invasive takes root in the new ecosystem. The Ohio State University's Winslow said it's also important to keep monitoring the wetland after it's finished. That also falls within ODNR's now-reduced H2Ohio budget. 'You can build a wetland and think it's gonna work, but then when you step back and monitor it, you're like, 'Oh, it's not working as good as it should, let's go in and do X, Y and Z,'' Winslow said. Schlater said the money for this particular wetland has already been allocated and won't be affected by the new budget. However, he worries the cuts may make it harder to find funding for new projects in northwest Ohio and elsewhere. 'There's a lot of great water in the state, and there's also a lot of impaired water in the state,' Schlater said. 'The H2Ohio funding opportunity for the state was really providing a lot of money directly impacting water quality, and any reduction in that is essentially less water that's gonna be improved, preserved or maintained.' The H2Ohio cuts are not the only setback this year in the effort to contain Lake Erie's harmful algal blooms. The Trump administration's staffing cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have forced that agency to suspend its deployment of Environmental Sample Processors, or ESPs, for the rest of the year. An ESP is a device that automatically collects and processes water samples from a body of water—in this case, Lake Erie—and gives researchers back home an almost real-time glimpse of how much toxin is present in a given part of the lake. Monica Allen, director of public affairs for NOAA Research, wrote in an email that the organization's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory will train other staffers on ESPs during the winter months, with the goal of resuming ESP deployment in 2026. Winslow said the cuts may force scientists to scale back how many places in Lake Erie they can sample. Those samples, which are spread over a large area, are how scientists understand what's actually happening in the lake. 'The data will never be inaccurate. A scientist or an academic institution, if they take a water sample, they are using the highest level of rigor to analyze those samples,' Winslow said. 'The one thing that you might see is the number of places that we can sample is not as broad.' Some monitoring is done with satellites, which Winslow said should continue operating as normal. It's understanding the chemicals in the water that may become more challenging. 'I don't think you'll see a hit in where the bloom is at and how thick it is, but you may see a delay in our ability to predict toxin in those blooms,' Winslow explained. Exacerbating the problem in the long run is climate change, which is bringing increased rainfall and higher temperatures to the Great Lakes region. 'We're seeing warmer temperatures, so the lake tends to warm up faster. This type of organism that causes these harmful algal blooms likes warmer water … so they could start showing up earlier,' Winslow said. However, Winslow stressed that the relationship between the algal blooms and the warming climate is complex. No matter how conducive the weather is, the overall size of the bloom still depends on how much phosphorus enters the lake. What the weather does affect, he explained, is the timing and duration. 'It's showing up early and lasting longer this time, but the maximum peak that it reaches is less than when it was cooler,' Winslow said. Exactly what that means for people in the long run remains to be seen, according to Winslow. It does raise the probability that members of the public will see the blooms, but the peak won't be as severe. What could become a problem, Winslow said, is if the earlier blooms come when cyanobacteria are producing the highest amount of toxins. That depends on another nutrient that also leeches out of the soil and into the lake: nitrogen. Nitrogen levels in Lake Erie are highest around the end of June and early July, he said. 'And so what we don't want is the peak to fall there, because then it means you have a bloom that's huge and crazy and very, very toxic,' Winslow said. Climate change also poses a potential threat to the mitigation efforts themselves. 'When you're designing a wetland, you're designing a wetland based on a certain river dumping into it, how much water's coming from that river. Well, if we're seeing more rainfall, we may have designed the wetlands not big enough, or maybe in the wrong place,' Winslow said. 'And for farmers, they lose their nutrients when it rains. So the more rain we're gonna get, the harder it is for them to keep their nutrients on their fields. So all of these solutions, wetlands and what we pay our farmers to do, … they're gonna be just harder to do because of climate change, because of more precipitation.' Solve the daily Crossword
Axios
a day ago
- Axios
E. coli spikes at Richmond river spots
Half of the eight Richmond river stations the James River Association monitors were showing elevated levels of E. coli as of Friday. Why it matters: If you're planning to take a dip in the James during this rare dry and sunny week, you may want to wait — and then double-check river conditions before you go. State of play: The James River Association collects river samples weekly in Richmond in summer and updates their map every Friday, the nonprofit's riverkeeper Tom Dunlap tells Axios. Their latest batch of data shows high to extremely high levels of E. coli in the James from around Belle Isle through Rocketts Landing and Osborne Landing. The stats from the previous week showed elevated E. coli readings at all of their Richmond stations. The big picture: The recent rain and Richmond's 19th-century sewer system are to blame. The city's sewer system combines stormwater with sewage, and filters it through Richmond's wastewater treatment plant. But when it rains heavily — as it seems to have every other day this month — the treatment plant can become overwhelmed and the excess gets dumped into the James. What comes out is 90% stormwater and around 10% wastewater, which includes whatever was flushed down your toilet. Reality check: Due to wildlife near the river, some amount of E. coli is always in the James, Dunlap says. Zoom in: According to a review of the city's combined sewer overflow monitors, 11 of its 25 "outfall" stations had at least one overflow last week, some as recently as Sunday. Those overflows can push water quality levels beyond what the Virginia Department of Health considers safe for swimming. That's why Virginia health officials "advise the public to avoid swimming in natural waterways for three days following rain events," a VDH spokesperson tells Axios. By the numbers: 235 (CFU/100mL) or below is the magic number for E. coli readings, Dunlap says. It's also what all the monitoring stations from Reedy Creek east to Huguenot Flatwater were showing, as of Friday. At the latest reading, the rest of the monitored spots showed: Belle Isle and the Rope Swing at Tredegar: 270 14th Street: 328 Chapel Island: 501 Rocketts Landing: 2,420 Which means: Swimming is OK from Huguenot Flatwater to Reedy Creek, as of the last reading. But Richmonders shouldn't be swimming at the rest, Dunlap says. Though, it's likely OK for kayaking or canoeing or recreation where one isn't submerged in the water. What we're watching: The rain over the weekend means those numbers will likely change and could make more parts of the river unsafe for swimming, Dunlap says. Pro tip: Dunlap's organization only has funding to do weekly monitoring for now, but he recommends checking the city's combined sewer overflow monitors.
