Contributed by AFSpillane

April Showers Bring Diseased Milwaukee Beaches
Last week, my brother and I were on holiday around the Gulf coastline of Florida. On the final day of our trip, we decided to soak up enough sun to last us through the next two months of the cold and dreary Wisconsin version of spring. As such, we headed to Clearwater Beach.

Just as we felt last year, the time of our first visit to this part of the country, we were still in awe of the breadth of the expansive white coast that marked this set of island keys just off of mainland Florida. Then, our conversation shifted to our hometown of Milwaukee, Bradford Beach near the eastside more specifically.

Without giving the idea too much though, I blurted, “Bradford beach is just…” I couldn’t find a word repulsive enough to accurately describe my sentiment regarding that particular stretch of Lake Michigan, so I simply grumbled under my breath. My brother, in turn, responded by laughing as if he understood what I was trying to say, despite my inability to attach a word to the idea.

Perhaps, other Milwaukeeans who have lived in the city in the last decade would relate to this too, but for those of you from out of town, let me describe, in brief, why I and others feel this way. Bradford Beach, in the last several years, has been the subject of a lot of press, and hardly ever for positive reasons. In fact, as a kid growing up in Milwaukee, the first I had ever heard of this member of the Milwaukee County Park System was a series of stories about a rancid smell that plagued not only the beach itself, but Lincoln Memorial Drive, the winding road following the Lake Michigan shore, extending from the Milwaukee Art Museum to the south, and the beginning of the North Shore neighborhoods to the north. When I was a teenager a few years back, more new stories that would make this beach even more notorious: according to the Journal Sentinel, a study found that, in the summer of 2004, “E. coli bacteria counts at Bradford exceeded safe levels for 61% of the three-month swimming season.” Further, the amounts of bacteria in the water were so high, that “you had a better than 50-50 chance of dousing yourself with E. coli” if you were to as much as go in the water there that year.

Peering over this old news article confirmed a memory stored in the back of head years ago as to the cause of this bacterial outbreak: the frequent sewage dumps executed by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD). These happenings also found their way into various manifestations in the news media, including an aerial view of a sail boat on the water, with bluer water on the east side of the boat, and dirty, brown clouds infesting the water closer to the shoreline. What’s more, local conservative talk radio host Charlie Sykes in the last few years has done a weekly segment of his show known as the “deep tunnel awards,” a set of dubious honors bestowed upon corrupt or incompetent players in the news each week, spoofing the project that is credited with initiating the nefarious dumps. In short, the deep tunnel was a Milwaukee city project to expand the municipal sewer system, to account for the occurrence of flash floods that in recent years have become more numerous. However, the tunnels built ended up being too small for even moderate amounts of rain. In response, MMSD began dumping excess untreated sewage into Lake Michigan. After a few years of this policy, correlated with years of the news media covering the story, such dumps in the lake are now public knowledge.

Obviously, a lot can happen in the course of only a few years. Every once in a while, when I’d take an afternoon run down Lincoln Memorial, I would see Bradford and McKinley populated with people looking to get some sun on a summer day, even a few people wading in the shallow water just short of where the sand begins. At the same time, though much of the blame for the state of Milwaukee’s beaches can be placed on the shoulders of MMSD, it is fantastical to expect local municipalities such as Milwaukee to be able to predict and prepare for any and every environmental hazard that its bureaucracies may encounter. Nonetheless, the failure of the deep tunnel project and the outcry against the sewage dumps should underscore the need for at least somewhat greater attention to the potential for such dangers. As is evidenced by at least one conversation in a distant beach in Clearwater, Florida, for some Milwaukeeans, the beaches that dot the shoreline of our hometown are now strongly associated with negative connotations, from a merely subjective shock and disgust at its past problems to a real fear for objective public health hazards in the future. Bradford Beach and the activities of MMSD provide only a few cases lending credence to the possibility of the consequences following such disgraces against nature as far outlasting the notorious events themselves.