Kosciusko County joins lake alert programs

WINONA LAKE, Ind. (WANE) - Summer often means spending time outdoors and enjoying the nice weather. Sometimes that means heading to a lake. But have you ever gone to a lake and found the beach was closed because of high bacteria levels? One county has joined a new alert system for the public.

Kosciusko County is now the 4th county to join two programs aimed to help inform people when public beaches are closed. Those programs are called the BeachGuard and BeachesAlert systems. The BeachGuard program is an online map showing visitors all open and closed lakes in the participating counties. The BeachesAlert system is a program where beach goers can sign up for text or email alerts to specific lakes. The system will send out an alert when a beach closes and reopens.

"As technology has changed we haven't always done a good job of keeping up to date with how we're notifying the public" said Nate Bosch, Director of Kosciusko Lakes and Streams. "So we saw this system that IDEM had in place for those counties in northwestern Indiana, and we thought that would be a great thing to use inland in Kosciusko County as well, and since we have over 100 lakes it made sense."

One of the main causes of a closed beach in Kosciusko County is high E. coli levels. This is typically caused by waterfowl and wild animal feces. Because of the drought this year, runoff from the surrounding land to the lake has been very low. This has helped keep E. coli levels down this year. So far in Kosciusko County, only one beach closing has occurred.

Kosciusko Lakes and Streams adopted this program from the counties around Lake Michigan. This is where the programs were originally developed. However, after seeing the success to our northwest, they thought it would be a perfect fit here.

"They received grant money from the EPA to develop this since that’s obviously an important area being part of the great lakes, but we'd love it if we could see this expanded to all parts of Indiana since there are so many lakes in Indiana" said Anna Burke, Program Manager of Kosciusko Lakes and Streams.