Week of July 14th

This week was a busy week. I did the Lake Michigan route all week which I enjoyed. Its the prettiest route I think. On Monday I took a volunteer out and showed him how we sample the water and put all he data in. I felt bad because my route starts at 5 am and he did not seem to thrilled to be up at that time.  But after a hour or so of being up he didn't seem to mind to much. We haven't had much rain this week which was nice because when it came to  resampling beaches we only had one or two. One of the days after my Lake Michigan route I went out with my boss and did something I haven't done yet. At one of our beaches we have had really high bacteria counts so we started monitoring it everyday instead of once a week and we noticed we were still seeing the bacteria levels were very high. So my boss and I walk all around this river that flows out into the beach area where we are getting high numbers and we walked all around testing different areas of water looking to see  if there is high conductivity. We used a machine that once you covered the bottom it would read the conductivity if the number was above 2 it means it has high counts so we would take samples at these places that had high numbers. One of the places we sampled we found one of the houses washer was hooked up to flow out into the river so that can defiantly account to high numbers and then we fallowed a long stretch going up stream of high numbers and once we got to the end of the river we walked up to  the road and realized there was construction going on the other side of the road. We think there many be sediment drifting into the stream. At this point we contact the city officials to go look into the problem and then if we still have problems we would go back out and keep testing varies areas in the river and try to find a new reason why we are having high levels. When walking all along the river I had to be careful not to get poison ivy on me luckily I didn't get any. But I did get stuck in a hip high mud hole that I needed help getting out of. But over all this week was great I learned new things and got a glimpse of  what I could be doing in my future and I love it. Im constantly learning new things and go out and not doing the same old job. I am so lucky to be apart of such a great internship program!