Every year when the summer sun warms Toronto's streets, I like to remind people how lucky we are to live in a city with so many great beaches where we can swim. Invariably, the responses range from "Are you crazy?" to "Eww."
So this summer, I decided to honour the city's supposedly stringent water-quality testing by swimming at all 11 lifeguarded beaches. I'm not talking about a quick wade to the knees, but swimming with my head underwater and my eyes open.
If the beaches are safe, a green flag is flown near the lifeguard chair. If not, a red flag goes up. The criteria are rigorous, and I was determined to trust the scientists at the city labs.
My swimming partner (read: reluctant girlfriend) and I first ventured into the water at Sunnyside Beach, just behind Sunnyside Pavilion off Lake Shore Boulevard. We gingerly laid our towels on the deserted beach in front of dozens of people drinking on the patio and dipped a toe in the water.
Clumps of foamy algae floated by, and the water seemed grey and murky.
Still, the E. coli count was at 18 bacteria per 100 millilitres, well below the limit of 100, so in we went. As soon as we got up to our waists, a lifeguard joined us in a boat.
"Are you our lifeguard?" we asked.
"Just for you," he answered.
It was hard to relax in the broth. A few metres down the beach, the water was marginally cleaner, so we relocated. Still, opening my eyes underwater took some willpower.
I found myself gazing through wispy clouds of algae, the visibility dimming after a few metres. When we resurfaced, my girlfriend and I checked each other over for blobs of algae hitching a ride. Afterward, we felt uncommonly refreshed, though, and experienced no ill effects.
I was impressed with my girlfriend's courage, as she had told me one of the many horror stories I heard when people found out I was going to swim in the lake. Apparently, a classmate had contracted a terrible skin disease when she came in contact with Lake Ontario water, forever affecting her Grade 3 social status. But that was before the days of the green flag.
Such a flag was fluttering at Bluffer's Park a few days later, even though we showed up the day after a torrential storm.
Chatting with the lifeguard, she candidly told me, "The water looks nasty. ... I wouldn't swim in it."
"Why is there a green flag then?" I asked.
"Oh, that's for two days ago," she said. "It takes them two days to process the E. coli tests."
"They don't close the beach even if the storm grates have overflowed?" I asked, aware that some storm drains in the city carry sewage.
"They might," she said, "but they won't have the results for another couple of days."
This made me re-evaluate my project. I called Toronto Public Health. "We have the most stringent standards in the world," said Mahesh Patel, manager of healthy environments, safe water program.
He said it takes 24 hours to test the E. coli levels, but when hoisting a flag, they also consider current conditions, such as weather. "We won't wait for the test results if we feel the water is unsafe," he says. "We do everything possible to err on the side of safety."
I told him of the green flag at Bluffer's Park after the rainstorm, and he assured me that it wasn't as bad as it looked. "I was there that day," he said. "There was a lot of debris; it was an unusual circumstance. Our standard is built in such a way to incorporate a huge safety gap ... to account for these unusual circumstances."
Still, the next day the beach was closed, with an E. coli count of 400, based on tests taken the day before. He assured me that this still wasn't very high.
The councillor for Bluffer's Park, Brian Ashton (Ward 36, Scarborough Southwest), said the lag in test results needs to be addressed.
"I would think the default position should be, if there's a major rain event, [the beach] would be posted red until you have test results," he said. "Otherwise, it's like jumping out of an airplane and testing your parachute after you've left the plane."
My confidence was shaken in the infallibility of the green flag.
Playing it safe, we hit the city's Blue Flag beaches, which are internationally recognized for their "excellent bathing quality." Four of them are on the Toronto Islands, which are rarely affected by overflow from city drains.
I swam with glee at the easternmost beach, able to see several metres through the fresh water. We moved west to the other beaches. At Hanlan's Beach, Toronto's only clothing-optional beach, we stripped down to join the throng. The water stayed shallow for a long time, so as we waded in, it took a while for the lake to cover our assets.
At Cherry Beach and Woodbine Beach, back on the mainland, only a handful of people swam, despite both a blue flag and the city's green flag flying.
Still, at this point we were feeling smug with our beach experiences, so it was time to head out into the wilds of Etobicoke. When we got to Marie Curtis Park East, at the foot of Brown's Line, the only two people swimming were wearing wet-suits, which didn't inspire confidence.
The 11 C water felt like a vice around our exposed bits, and the water was dark and murky, with rocks strewn on the lake bottom. We took home inadvertent souvenirs from this swim in the form of algae we only found later when taking a shower.
We were determined to stay away from Bluffer's Park and Rouge Beach until we were sure neither had seen a red flag or a rainstorm in days. And naturally, once we were armed with this new fear of heavy rains and lagging tests, it started to rain in Toronto. And rain and rain.
We've still got two beaches left, and we're determined to swim them before the summer's out. Although the rating system isn't foolproof, I feel pretty comfortable swimming in Lake Ontario water. It's certainly a nice way to spend a summer.
The E. coli standard
The City of Toronto uses criteria set by the provincial Beach Management Protocol, which means there must be fewer than 100 E. coli bacteria per 100 millilitres for the water to be declared safe for swimming.
The federal government requires a count of only 200 E. coli, which most of the other provinces use to manage their
beaches.
Every day at 3 p.m., results from the previous day's E. coli tests are sent to lifeguards on the beach. Based on trends in the data and predictions by city staffers of the current day's conditions, the lifeguards raise either a green or red flag. The information is then updated on the city's water quality hotline (416-392-7161) and its website (Toronto.ca/beach).
Usually the numbers don't change a lot from day to day, but if it rains, the E. coli count can spike because of overflowing storm drains in the city. The city will often raise the red flag if there is reason to believe the counts will continue to be high the next day, but not always, so be wary where you swim after heavy rains (Rouge Beach, Bluffer's Park, Sunnyside Beach and Marie Curtis Park East are most affected by rainfall).
Joseph Wilson
Water quality project
In 2003, City Council passed the Wet Weather Flow Management Master Plan in order to address the problem of rainfall overflow ending up in Lake Ontario.
Older areas of the city have drainage that combines both sewage and storm water, so when the drains overflow, sewage can be swept into the lake. In the nineties, the city dealt with this by installing two underground reservoirs near Woodbine Beach to catch this overflow and direct it to sewage-treatment plants. This has improved the quality of the water in the area.
There is a similar tank at Sunnyside Beach, although Sunnyside is affected more by runoff from the nearby Humber River and from goose and gull droppings.
In the future, the city hopes to add more reservoir tanks to service Balmy Beach in the Eastern Beaches area and for Bluffer's Park. The ultimate goal is to clean up the Don River and the Inner Harbour area by re-establishing the natural watershed.
Joseph Wilson
