This article was first published by Koby Levin of Outlier Media. WXYZ is a proud partner of Outlier Media
It’s been a confusing week for would-be Belle Isle swimmers.
The beach closed for swimming over the weekend after tests showed high levels of bacteria, but a crowd of people hopped in the water on Saturday anyway, apparently unaware of official communications about the closure.
While the episode offered confirmation for Detroiters’ long-standing skepticism of the river, experts tell Outlier Media that despite the occasional closure, the water is typically safe for swimming. The beach reopened Monday evening after water tests showed bacteria had returned to safe levels.
What’s a Detroiter to make of all this murky water? It’s hot out. We all want to be able to take a cool dip at the city’s greatest park without sparing a thought for bacteria.
We can’t promise easy answers, but there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the latest closure. We’ve put together this guide to help Detroiters decide whether swimming at Belle Isle Beach (when it’s open) is the right decision for them.
We’ll also post any meaningful updates about beach safety here. Our original article about swimming in the Detroit River can be found here.
Before you go any further, take an easy first step: Sign up for Belle Isle updates from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which include beach closure notifications.
When is it safe to swim at Belle Isle?
The answer is sometimes simple.
Don’t swim if the beach is closed by the Detroit Health Department due to high bacteria levels. You could get sick.
Don’t swim if it has rained a lot in the last 48 hours. Rain can wash bird poop — and the bacteria that come with it — from the shore into the water.
Don’t swim if you have an open cut on your body. This is an invitation to harmful bacteria.
If none of the above are true, the answer is less clear-cut.
Just look at the recent closure. Detroit hasn’t had rain in two weeks, and experts told Outlier Media they couldn’t be sure what caused bacteria levels to spike.
(One possible culprit — droppings from swimming geese — supports the common-sense notion that bathers should stay as far away as possible from swimming geese.)
Water tests offer some peace of mind, but arrive too slowly to guarantee the water is clean at a given time. Park rangers take samples for testing once a week, and there’s typically a 48-hour delay before results are processed and reported.
As with swimming in any lake or river, there’s some risk to swimming at the Belle Isle Beach. Living with that risk is up to each swimmer.
Yamenah Abdullah enjoys a dip at Belle Isle Beach — up to her ankles. The born-and-raised Detroiter said she knows the river well enough to distrust it.
“I’m a feet-in-the-water type of person,” Abdullah said on an afternoon in mid-May. “I don’t dive all the way in.” Keeping one eye on her son building a sand castle, she added, “I hate to use the word ‘unsanitary,’ but…”
On the other hand, Antonio Cosme, co-founder of Black to the Land, a nonprofit that helps Black and Indigenous people connect with nature, notes environmental risks we live with already: microplastics, exhaust from cars and trucks, lead in paint and soil.
“Where is it that you’re willing to take the risk?” Cosme said. “Seems arbitrary to select the river as that point.”
“As someone with native ancestry with a deep love for what’s left of the ecosystems, I want a relationship with them. And that means swimming in the Detroit River,” he added.
Keep an eye on water testing data, but bear delays in mind
Michigan Poet Laureate Nandi Comer loves Belle Isle but said she wouldn’t consider swimming there.
As a kid, Comer visited the beach on regular church trips and never hesitated to get in the water. As a young adult, she noticed Canadian authorities sometimes closed beaches on the other side of the Detroit River due to water quality issues.
“I remember thinking, ‘Why doesn’t Detroit have an alert system to let people know if the water is safe?’ It’s the same river,” she said.
County and local officials thought the same. The water has been tested for bacteria during most summers since 2005, with gaps due to the pandemic and funding shortfalls. Right now, tests are conducted weekly.
Rangers with the DNR, which runs Belle Isle under an agreement with the city, wade into water at several locations around the beach to scoop up samples to be sent to a lab for testing.
Days can pass before results are reported to the public. That process was further slowed last week after a miscommunication by DNR officials led the test results to sit unseen in a ranger’s inbox for a day, said Tom Bisett, who manages Belle Isle for the Department of Natural Resources. The Memorial Day holiday also pushed back test results, he said.
At least one major park operator in the U.S. — San Diego County — has switched to water testing technology that provides same-day results. San Diego County still tests the water just once a week.
How is the public informed about bacteria at the beach?
When the Belle Isle Beach closed this past weekend, park managers placed signs on the beach and around the island, sent a text message alert to subscribers, and posted about the closure on social media. The signs and text alerts didn’t mention E. coli or the possibility of illness.
After beachgoers ignored the signs this weekend, some criticized the DNR for failing to catch the public’s attention.
Stay safe by observing beach closures. The Belle Isle text message update service is a good way to stay on top of the latest closures and openings.
Is swimming at Belle Isle normally harmful to my health?
The latest closure is the first since 2021 and one of only a handful in the last decade.
Across 11 years of testing data, average bacteria levels have been under half the amount considered safe for swimming by relatively cautious Canadian authorities.
Dana Jay, a spokesperson for Henry Ford Health, said in May that while the hospital has treated one case of listeria linked to recent swimming in the Detroit River, clinicians at the health care provider don’t typically see a rush of waterborne illnesses in the summer.
According to an emergency room physician at Detroit Medical Center who was not authorized to speak publicly, a handful of people contracted serious infections linked to swimming in the Detroit River, including at Belle Isle, and have sought care at DMC in recent years. A spokesperson for the hospital system did not return requests for comment.
Comer welcomed news that the water is being tested but said she’s not quite ready to dive back in.
“I will likely put my feet in the water the next time I am there,” she said. “As long as it isn’t after a heavy rain.”
A mixed reputation for the Detroit River
The weather was dreamy on a recent visit to the beach in May, but the beach was full of Detroit River skeptics. Ask if they plan to get in the water, and the first answer might be a grimace.
“I heard it’s kind of icky,” said Ciara Miner, a Detroit resident. “Wasn’t this beach closed for E. coli at one time?”
“It’s the Detroit River,” said Jayna Wood, who also lives in Detroit, placing emphasis on the word Detroit. “It’s in the middle of the city. It’s not clean.”
“There’s Zug Island right down the street,” said Austin Kole, referencing the notorious industrial site six miles away. “It’s a little sketchy.”
Detroit haters? Not these folks. They would like nothing more than to be wrong about swimming here.
And they are wrong to dismiss the river entirely. The swimming area on the north side of the island park is as safe as any other freshwater beach in the metro area except after a heavy rain.
And while rain can wash bacteria-filled goose poop from the shore into the water, those germs don’t last long thanks to the steady current of the Detroit River, which also protects the beach from industrial pollution.
“The water in the Detroit River is very, very good,” said Jeffrey Ram, a professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine, where he focuses on molecular aquatic ecology. Ram has published research based on water tests conducted at Belle Isle, and he points out that much of our drinking water is drawn from the river at Belle Isle, where it’s purified and piped into homes.
“After a rainstorm, you might get some high levels (of bacteria) at Belle Isle Beach. But on the whole, it’s going to be clean water.”
River otters — which made national headlines when they were spotted last year in Detroit for the first time in forever — convinced Fatima Squirewell to trust the water.
“If they think it’s OK, I think it’s OK,” said Squirewell, a nail technician who had taken the afternoon off to hang out with her children by the water.
Please don’t drown
While currents are good for water quality, they can be dangerous. The billions of gallons of water that zip past Belle Isle every hour are a threat to even the strongest swimmers.
Drowning is a risk in any body of water, and that includes Belle Isle, where drownings seem to make headlines every few years.
The beach is nestled in a cove that calms the current near the shore. Stick to that shallow area, which is marked by buoys during summer, to minimize your risk.
Do keep an eye on your loved ones: There are no lifeguards at the beach.
Pollution goes with the flow
Detroiters have a century of reasons — such as industrial dumping and environmental racism — for distrusting their river.
In this city, water and pollution too often go hand in hand. Zug Island and the oil refineries. Lead in the pipes that carry our drinking water. Sewage in the Rouge River. At the Uniroyal industrial site, a few hundred yards from the island, large deposits of arsenic, lead and cyanide on the riverbank were only recently “capped” by a seven-foot-thick barrier.
But when Detroiters swim at Belle Isle, Zug Island and Uniroyal might as well be in Utah.
That water this infamous is typically safe for swimming is a lucky byproduct of the Detroit River’s size and swift current.
From Belle Isle Beach, the water often appears still, and when the wind blows from the west, the river seems to flow backward into Lake St. Clair. Do not be fooled. The river moves more water — faster — than all but a handful of the mightiest rivers in the United States.
At its mouth, the Detroit River pours more than two Olympic swimming pools into Lake Erie every second.
Sunbathe on the beach for an hour (without napping), and you’ll watch 1.6 billion gallons of water slide past at nearly three miles per hour.
The tremendous, unrelenting current runs from the island toward the Ambassador Bridge, acting as a barrier against pollution downstream and on the riverbanks.
When bacteria from animal droppings get into the water, the current helps with that, too.
Even though Belle Isle Beach is protected by a cove, the water is still flushed out quickly. So quickly that if a mischief-maker dropped a bucketful of E. coli into the water at the beach, much of it would be quickly swept away by the current or die off, and the survivors would sink to the bottom and go dormant, said Lisa Reynolds Fogarty, chief science officer for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Water Science Center.
Why rain matters for swimming safety
Rain washes poop from animals (and in rare cases, from humans) into the water, and that poop contains bacteria.
Under a microscope, E. coli bacteria look like Tic Tacs you really don’t want to eat. Swimming in water with E. coli can lead to urinary tract infections, diarrhea, pneumonia and other illnesses.
E. coli isn’t the only thing you need to worry about after a rain. Beach monitoring focuses on E. coli because it’s an “indicator species”: When it’s thriving, other problematic microbes likely are, too.
Experts emphasize a single rule of thumb for safe swimming at Belle Isle: Do not get in that water after a downpour.
“I’ll tell you what I tell my kids,” said David Szlag, a professor of environmental engineering at Oakland University with expertise in beach monitoring. “If it rains more than a quarter inch, don’t swim for a day. If it rains more than a half inch, don’t swim for two days.”
Do we need to worry about human waste? Recall the summer of 2021, when record rainfalls flooded thousands of homes and turned I-94 into a lagoon. The sewer system overflowed, and cities across the region dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage into local waterways.
Tests that year repeatedly found elevated levels of E. coli, and the beach was closed for most of August.
But it’s unlikely that bacteria from that sewage survived the current to get to Belle Isle Beach and was concentrated enough to cause a problem, said Shannon Briggs, a toxicologist who monitors beach water quality for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. (Dedicated sleuths can search this database on sewage overflows.)
A ‘considerable’ threat
Geese and gulls, not humans, are the most likely sources of bacterial contamination, according to a 2022 study that relied on extensive water sampling data from 2017 at Belle Isle Beach.
Rains heavy enough to overwhelm the sewer system are rare. Geese, along with other critters, are common, which helps explain why even less major downpours are a risk to swimmers.
To put it mildly, the Canada goose population has increased, recovering well since being listed as an endangered species 50 years ago. Today, the ornery, tuxedoed birds celebrate their evolutionary win by spending more time on Belle Isle than anyone.
“You’ve probably seen what the geese leave after they’ve spent the day there, and it’s considerable,” Briggs said.
With a heavy rain, much of that goose waste ends up in the water.
Eat the fish, but not too muchAnglers are advised to be careful about eating fish from the Detroit River. The type of fish matters because certain types of fish have feeding patterns that lead them to absorb more pollutants from the river, such as mercury.
Consult this guide before you decide what fish to eat and how much of it.
