As the USA Triathlon gets set to begin bright and early Saturday morning, the buzz all week has been whether or not the water quality at Edgewater has cleared up since Monday's heavy rain that sent untreated storm water and sewage into Lake Erie.
Science shows that it's good to go.
The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) takes samples of water from all over the area every day, including Edgewater Beach. While actual e-coli results take up to 24 hours, a prediction can be made every morning, backed up by years of data to ensure accuracy.
"We also collect environmental conditions at the beach that morning," says NEORSD's Scott Broski. "And run those environmental conditions through a model. The model makes a prediction for the water quality for the day."
However, when the sewer system overflowed, an emergency plan kicked in with more sampling that required actual results before the beach was reopened.
"Rather than collecting just the one sample once a day, we add 4 additional samples from the shoreline and 5 samples that are taken by boat off-shore. And we do that twice a day, so we're getting 20 samples a day for analysis," Broski tells us.
It wasn't until all samples came back clear that the beach reopened on Thursday.
As for this weekend's USA Triathlon National Championships, it's back to the daily prediction model which looks like the area will be in good shape, assuming there are no major environmental changes.
"Things can change rapidly, so as long as the weather stays somewhat nice, we'd expect the beach to post good," Broski adds.