Officials issue warning about blue-green algae at Cherry Creek Reservoir in Aurora
Friends Sonya Dominguez and Vanessa Saenz spent their Sunday morning paddleboarding in the reservoir.
"It was cold today, but it felt really good because it's so hot," said Dominguez. "There was a lot of, like, you know, motorboats out too. So sometimes there would be some waves, which is nice."
They weren't the only ones. Plenty of people took advantage of the long weekend to take a refreshing dip in the water. But the park wasn't full, which surprised them.
"I was surprised. Especially with it being like 4th of July weekend, it was not as busy," Saenz said.
"Yeah, I was anticipating a lot worse, to be honest," Dominguez added.
It may have been because of the blue-green algae on the shore and in the water. Cherry Creek State Park posted online Saturday that the lake has blue-green algae. They advised keeping children and pets out of the water because it can cause illness.
If you come in contact with it, health experts advise showering immediately. You can fish, but park officials urge people to rinse off their fish and dispose of their guts when cleaning them.
Boating is allowed, but they say if you choose to swim, you're doing so at your own risk.
"I was freaking out a little bit about it. I was like, 'it's touching my leg,'" said Saenz.
"I'm really trying to find different places to get in the water because of that," Dominguez said.
Dominguez and Saenz say the algae won't stop them from paddle boarding the rest of the day, but they will make sure not to skip that post-paddle shower they were each planning to take.
"It is what it is," Dominguez said. "We've already been in the water, so might as well just keep it going."
If you have any questions, you can call the park office at 303-690-1166 ext. 1.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
31 minutes ago
- CNN
Judge temporarily blocks Trump administration from enforcing funding ban against Planned Parenthood
Source: CNN A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a provision of President Donald Trump's sweeping domestic policy law to defund Planned Parenthood's health care services. The order from US District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, blocks the provision's enforcement for 14 days. The measure would bar Medicaid users from coverage with a health care provider that also provides abortion services. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America – along with Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and Planned Parenthood Association of Utah – sued the administration earlier Monday, arguing that the funding ban would have devastating consequences across the country. While the legislation, which Trump signed on Friday, does not explicitly mention Planned Parenthood, the nationwide family planning and health care provider is in its crosshairs. The law prohibits federal funding for providers 'primarily engaged in family planning services, reproductive health, and related medical care' that also provide abortion. Planned Parenthood has warned that nearly 200 clinics nationwide – which also provide birth control, STI testing and treatment, and cancer screening – could close as a result of the bill's one-year ban on funds. Ninety percent of those clinics, Planned Parenthood says, are in states where abortion is legal. 'This case is about making sure that patients who use Medicaid as their insurance to get birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment can continue to do so at their local Planned Parenthood health center, and we will make that clear in court,' Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. The bill originally barred funds for ten years, before the Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, reduced the measure to one year. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the two local networks celebrated Monday's order, while warning in a statement of the consequences if the provision is ultimately allowed to take effect. 'Already, in states across the country, providers and health center staff have been forced to turn away patients who use Medicaid to get basic sexual and reproductive health care because President Trump and his backers in Congress passed a law to block them from going to Planned Parenthood,' the groups said. 'There are no other providers who can fill the gap if the 'defunding' of Planned Parenthood is allowed to stand.' CNN has reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for comment. Earlier Monday, anti-abortion advocates quickly railed against Planned Parenthood's suit. 'Planned Parenthood's desperation is showing as they run to the courts again to fix a crisis of their own making,' said Susan B. Anthony's Pro-Life America director of legal affairs and policy counsel Katie Daniel. Planned Parenthood is also battling the Trump administration in court over cuts to a federal teen pregnancy prevention program. Lawyers for five Planned Parenthood networks argued in a federal District of Columbia court this June that administration's changes to the program, including limits on language around diversity and equity, were vague and could bar Planned Parenthood from providing longtime services. This story and headline have been updated with additional developments. See Full Web Article
Forbes
36 minutes ago
- Forbes
Healthcare ETF Underperforms S&P 500: Price Charts Show How Much
Healthcare stocks The big healthcare stocks are not keeping up with wider stock market. When the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 recently popped to new highs, this sector vastly underperformed it. It's likely the problem has to do with much investor concern about cuts to Medicaid and other 'big beautiful bill' adjustments. 4 Healthcare Stocks (And The ETF) Fail To Keep Up Healthcare Select Sector SPDR ETF: Healthcare Select Sector SPDR ETF, daily price chart, 7 7 25. The fund is way down from those October 2024 prices. The rally from mid-December 2024 to early March 2025 failed to make it above the previous autumn's highs. The 200-day moving average is trending downward. Note that the 50-day moving average crossed below the 200-day in mid-December 2024. The ETF has 60 holdings in the sector. Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly daily price chart, 7 7 25. One of the old-school brand names in the group, Eli Lilly has been in business for 150 years. The drug maker focuses on cancer, immunology, diabetes and obesity, among other areas. The company recently acquired Verve Therapeutics, a Boston firm working on cardiovascular treatments. The stock hit a peak in February of just above $930. It joined others dropping into April 7 where the price bottomed at near $675. A brief rally from there failed to close above a declining 200-day moving average and now Lilly trades under the 50-day moving average. Market cap is $732.48 billion. Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson daily price chart, 7 7 25. With a market cap of $373.59 billion, the company is component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and of the S&P 500. Johnson & Johnson is a household name: it's been around for 139 years. The price-earnings ratio is 17. The drug maker pays a dividend of 3.31%. The stock reached a peak in early March of $168. It's been unable to recover to anywhere near that level following the early April sell-off. Today's closing price puts it above both the 50-day and the 200-day moving averages. Abbvie AbbVie daily price chart, 7 7 25. The North Chicago-based drug manufacturer recently purchased biotech firm Capstan for $2.1 billion. In May, Citigroup downgraded their opinion of AbbVie from 'buy" to 'neutral' with a price target of $205. In April, Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage with an 'overweight' tag, price targeted for $210. AbbVie pays a 3.47% dividend. The price peaked in early March at near $216. The sell-off into early April was dramatic with a price drop to near $162.50. Today's close put it at just above the 50-day moving average and the 200-day moving average. Amgen Amgen daily price chart, 7 7 25. Amgen hit a peak of just above $330 in early March. The stock tanked in early April along with the market as a whole but never made it back to the high. Right now, the price is slightly above a down-trending 200-day moving average. Friday's high could not quite make it above the June high near $300. The drug manufacturer has a market cap of $157.52 billion. The Thousand Oaks, California-based company is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100. The stock trades with a price-earnings ratio of 26. Amgen pays a 3.29% dividend. Stats courtesy of Charts courtesy of No artificial intelligence was used in the writing of this post. More analysis and commentary at
CNN
41 minutes ago
- CNN
Local officials facing questions over lack of preparations in the years and hours before deadly Texas floods
As Central Texas reels from flash floods that killed over 100 people this weekend, questions are sharpening about whether officials could have done more to avert the tragedy – both in the decades leading up to the disaster, and in the moments after the Guadalupe River began cresting its banks. In recent years, multiple efforts in Kerr County to build a more substantial flood warning system have faltered or been abandoned due to budget concerns, leaving the epicenter of this weekend's floods without emergency sirens that could have warned residents about the rising waters. And while at least one neighboring county issued evacuation orders in the morning hours of July 4, Kerr County officials don't appear to have done so. A review of typically off-the-record communications from a real-time messaging system operated by the National Weather Service showed that no emergency manager from Kerr County was sending messages or interacting with NWS staff on the platform, even as emergency officials from other counties were doing so. CNN was granted permission to report some of the information from this platform. The lack of messages doesn't mean officials in Kerr County weren't monitoring the communications from the NWS and acting on them. But it raises new questions about local officials' actions, particularly in a crucial window between NWS's first public warning alert at 1:14 a.m. and a more urgent flash flood warning sent several hours later. Some local officials have defended the decision not to order broad evacuations, saying they were concerned cars could have been trapped in quickly rising waters. Kerr County Emergency Management Coordinator W.B. 'Dub' Thomas declined to comment when CNN asked him to explain actions the county took in the early morning hours of Friday. 'I don't have time for an interview, so I'm going to cancel this call,' he said. While NWS issued numerous warnings early Friday morning as the danger increased, it's unclear how widely they reached those in more remote areas where cell phone service may have been limited – including at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors were killed. Some campers at Mystic were staying in areas that had previously been identified as high-risk flood zones, government records show. Ali Mostafavi, a civil engineering professor at Texas A&M University, said the disaster showed how efforts to prepare for floods failed to keep pace with the risk in a region that he described as 'one of the deadliest flash flood alleys in the nation.' Local warning systems 'might have been adequate in the past,' Mostafavi said. 'But for the new norm, they are not adequate.' Local officials have long acknowledged the risk of deadly flooding in Kerr County. At a 2016 meeting, County Commissioner Tom Moser declared that Kerr was 'probably the highest risk area in the state for flooding,' and described the county's early warning system as 'pretty antiquated' and 'marginal at the best.' Moser, who retired from the commission in 2021, told CNN that his efforts to improve the local system hit wall after wall over the years. After massive flooding elsewhere in the Hill Country region in 2015, Moser said he studied how nearby Comal County had installed sirens, adopted plans for shutting off low-water crossings and made other flood preparations. He suggested that Kerr County follow suit. But some locals questioned where the funding would come from, while others worried about noise: 'Some people didn't like the concept of sirens going off and disturbing everybody,' Moser said. One of his fellow commissioners, H. A. 'Buster' Baldwin, voiced those concerns at a 2016 meeting. 'The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I'm going to have to start drinking again to put up with y'all,' said Baldwin, who died in 2022, according to a transcript of the meeting. In 2017, officials with the county and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which manages the river, applied for $980,000 in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to build a flood warning system but were denied, meeting minutes and public records show. Without state or federal funding, Moser said, a flood warning system 'just didn't get to the top of the list' of funding priorities for the county itself – even though commissioners had considered 'all the number of people that have died in flash floods in the past.' Again in 2021, meeting minutes show how county commissioners discussed possibly allocating funds for a flood warning system that specifically included sirens. An engineer said a county commissioner had 'identified' $50,000 for the system. But the plans went nowhere. More recently, local officials considered applying for money for the system from Texas' Flood Infrastructure Fund, but declined to submit an application because the grant would have only covered about five percent of the cost of installation, according to documents from the river authority. Just this year, officials were moving forward with a more limited goal: The river authority posted a request for bids on a project to develop a data resource 'to improve flood warning to the public' in the county, according to an archived webpage from February. In April, the river agency passed a resolution to select a firm for the project, and an official said at a meeting the following month that 'consolidating rainfall, stream flow and other flood-related [data] would enhance delivery of flood warnings for the public,' according to an article in the Kerrville Daily Times. Moser said he thought that if the county had implemented an early warning system, it could have saved lives. 'You know, cell phones are good, okay? Text messages are good. But at the same time, there are places in the Hill Country you can't get a good signal,' he said. In the nearby town of Comfort, Texas, further downstream on the Guadalupe River, two sirens were helpful in alerting residents to evacuate, Brian Boyter, a volunteer firefighter in the town, told CNN. First responders on Monday in Comfort were still finding bodies that had washed down the river from Kerr County, but Boyter said that he wasn't aware of any flooding deaths in Comfort. The two areas have significant differences in topography and flood timing that made the flooding in Kerr County much more deadly, but Boyter attributed his town's success in part to the warning sirens. The Upper Guadalupe River Authority does have five gauges on the river in Kerr County, and one on a tributary, Johnson Creek, according to its website. Those gauges show the river level rose as much as 30 feet within a few hours early Friday morning. But Philip Bedient, a professor of engineering at Rice University who researches disaster management and flood modeling, said he thought the river should have at least double or triple that number of gauges in place. 'There should have been a better system,' Bedient said, calling the devastation caused by the flooding 'inexcusable.' He said the fact that Kerr County had been rejected for grant money to fund a warning system was 'just horrific.' 'I don't think they'll get turned down this time,' he said. Mark Rose, who worked as the manager of another Texas river authority, agreed that a larger network of gauges to give residents real-time information about the river's water level and 'what's coming down' toward them is critical – and worth the price tag. 'We'll spend more on recovery than the several million it would cost to put in a system of gauges,' Rose said of the Kerr County disaster. Without warning sirens, residents who faced rapidly rising waters in the early hours of July 4 were forced to rely on cellphone alerts and door-knocks from their neighbors. The National Weather Service issued its first public warning about the flooding in Kerr County at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, warning of 'life-threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams.' That warning, and subsequent warnings, triggered alerts to mobile devices through the Wireless Emergency Alert system, according to a CNN analysis of a FEMA alert database. The 1:14 a.m. message was followed by a series of increasingly dire bulletins, including a 4:03 a.m. warning saying, 'Move to higher ground now! This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation.' But cellphone service in the area can be spotty, and not all residents appear to have received the alerts in the critical early-morning hours when the floodwaters rose. Behind the scenes, NWS officials were communicating with local emergency managers in the affected region over an internal messaging platform. Typically, the media is expected to treat messages from this platform as off-the-record, but a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official granted CNN permission to report general information about the Texas disaster from the platform. The messages show that after initial briefings on the afternoon of Thursday, July 3, about the potential of heavy rains to come, emergency managers from some counties in the region were posting on the system, querying forecasters about what to expect. Those messages picked up in pace as the flooding began in the early hours of July 4. But no emergency manager from Kerr County participated in those discussions on the messaging platform. It's unclear whether officials were reviewing the information being shared. As the floodwaters rose, officials in neighboring Kendall County ordered evacuations of residents living along Guadalupe River on Friday morning. But while Kerr County posted social media messages about the flooding on the morning of July 4, officials do not appear to have ordered any immediate evacuations. Local officials have defended the decision in recent days, saying that an evacuation in the middle of the night as waters were rapidly rising could have put more people in danger. In 1987, 10 campers in the region were killed when their bus was caught in Guadalupe River floodwaters as they were evacuating a flash flood, according to the NWS. 'It's very tough to make those calls,' Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice told CNN on Monday. 'Evacuation is a delicate balance, because if you evacuate too late, you then risk putting buses or cars or vehicles or campers on roads into low water areas trying to get them out, which then can make it even more challenging.' 'What we also don't want to do is cry wolf,' Rice added. The risk was especially high at Camp Mystic, the nearly 100-year-old girls' camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, where counselors and campers were forced to flee for higher ground amid rapidly rising floodwaters and more than two dozen people died. Some of the cabins campers were staying in are located in the river's 'regulatory floodway' – the area that floods first and is most dangerous – according to federal flood maps. Other cabins were located in an area that the federal government has determined has a 1% chance of flooding each year. New construction or significant renovations in those zones would have required a specific review by a local floodplain manager, according to Kerr County documents. But historic aerial imagery shows that the cabins in the area of the campground most affected by flooding have been there for more than 50 years. The county floodplain administrator did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. L. David Givler, a hydrologist and civil engineer based in Texas, said that residents and business owners in flood zones often don't realize the danger they're in. 'I don't think you're going to find anybody who would say it's a good idea for those structures to be there,' Givler said of Camp Mystic's cabins. CNN's Thomas Bordeaux, Isabelle Chapman, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Brandon Miller, Bob Ortega, and Jeff Winter contributed to this report.
