Fw: Recent Article in Milwaukee Magazine

[Richard L Whitman <rwhitman@usgs.gov>]

----- Forwarded by Richard L Whitman/BRD/USGS/DOI on 07/14/2005 10:47 AM
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                      "Magruder, Chris                                                                        
                      "                        To:       <richard_whitman@usgs.gov>                           
                      <CMagruder@mmsd.c        cc:                                                            
                      om>                      Subject:  Recent Article in Milwaukee Magazine                 
                                                                                                              
                      07/12/2005 09:17                                                                        
                      AM                                                                                      
                                                                                                              




FYI
Recent article from Milwaukee Magazine



Murphy’s Law
This week’s news and views by Bruce Murphy.


DOES THE JOURNAL SENTINEL HATE THE SEWERAGE DISTRICT?
And: Why a Downtown Casino Is a Bad Idea


Since 2000, the Journal Sentinel has written 19 stories blaming sewage
overflows for bacterial contamination of beaches. None of the stories were
true.


Such was the conclusion of UWM Great Lakes Water Institute researchers
Erika Jensen and Sandra McLellan. Their study was briefly reported in a
story that was buried toward the back of the Journal Sentinel’s Metro
section on June 2nd. The article was not even included among the 15 major
stories for that day on the newspaper’s Web site.


The UWM study concludes that storm-water runoff contaminated with fecal
waste from pets and wildlife, particularly sea gulls and other shore birds,
is the main cause of high E-coli ratings at Milwaukee’s beaches. The
researchers may be wrong, but they offer abundant evidence to prove their
point. Don’t we need to know their findings in detail and on the front
page, to balance off the countless stories that have blamed the Milwaukee
Metropolitan Sewerage District for the problem?


The Journal Sentinel’s coverage of the sewerage district is one of the
long-running scandals in Wisconsin journalism. For years, the paper has run
screaming front-page headlines about sewage overflows, suggesting that
Milwaukee had a unique (and hence very newsworthy) problem. Yet the paper’s
own reporter, Dan Egan, once did an investigation of other cities on the
Great Lakes, showing that Milwaukee’s record was about the same as in other
places.


His findings showed the following amounts of sewage dumped by cities
annually: 23.3 billion gallons by Chicago, 19.41 billion by Detroit, 5
billion to 6 billion by Cleveland, 2.8 billion by Toronto, 1.8 billion by
Milwaukee and 300 million to 400 million by Gary.


Recognize a trend here? The bigger the city, the more sewage dumped, with
the exception of those cleanly Canadians in Toronto.


To the Journal Sentinel’s credit, Egan’s story made the front page, but the
paper still seems consistently negative when covering the sewerage
district. Marie Rohde and Steve Schultze are solid reporters (Schultze is
arguably one of the paper’s best), but for whatever reason, they always
seem to be on the anti-MMSD bandwagon. Must be something in the water the
editors are drinking.


In their coverage of the Great Lakes Water Institute study, Schultze and
Rohde were happy to note that the biggest funder of the Great Lakes study
was the sewerage district. Fair enough, but the reporters also quoted
someone from the Natural Resources Defense Council calling the study biased
but didn’t explain the NRDC’s potential bias as well: Its research was
strongly criticized by the Great Lakes study.


Meanwhile, readers weren’t given all of the details on the Great Lakes
study. The researchers have done 3,000 samples of water to measure E-coli
over the past five years.


“We’ve measured every beach between here and Door County,” says researcher
Erika Jensen. “We’ve found high E-coli ratings everywhere. It’s kind of a
universal problem.”


The researchers have found that the water in the parking lots near Bradford
Beach has had E-coli ratings 20,000 times higher than the minimum allowed
for safe swimming. And that’s the water that runs off into the lake. They
note that the beach is typically closed 30 to 45 days a summer, though
there is an average of less than three sewerage overflows per summer.
They’ve also found that E-coli discharged from sewage overflows typically
gets absorbed quickly by the lake waters and doesn’t show up in E-coli
measurements.


In short, it’s unlikely that most beach closings are related to sewage
overflows. Jensen and McLellan are careful to note that overflows are a
huge problem. Their findings have convinced them that some method of
measuring the impact of these overflows needs to be found because E-coli
testing isn’t useful for this purpose.


The researchers, in short, aren’t defenders of the sewerage district but
experienced investigators at one of UWM’s most highly touted departments,
whose work is also federally funded and who are out to improve the
environment and people’s understanding of it.


“We do speeches to groups throughout southeast Wisconsin,” Jensen says,
“and when we say beach closings are mainly caused by storm-water runoff, a
lot of people are shocked. They say, ‘No, it must be coming from the sewage
overflows.’”


That’s why the researchers did their study, with its analysis of the
Journal Sentinel’s coverage. The public is owed a more complete
understanding of the issue from the state’s largest newspaper.

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