RELATED | Lake Travis undergoes dramatic changes as it nears full capacity<\/a><\/p>\n“As we see runoff occur in our area, there’s going to be a lot of debris that will be a part of the flows that come into the system,” said John Hofmann, Executive Vice President of Water at the LCRA. “It generally also has an elevated amount of bacteria associated with those flows.”<\/p>\n
Dr. Desmar Walkes, Medical Director at Austin Public Health, says that bacteria can cause a myriad of health problems for people who may swim in or accidentally ingest flood-impacted water.<\/p>\n
“You can develop GI illness or stomach illness, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting. Exposure to the eyes can cause eye infections,” she said. “You can develop swimmer’s ear, ear infections, and if you have open wounds, you can develop infections of those wounds… you may actually sustain injury from debris that’s in the water, cuts, bruises, and the like.”<\/p>\n
KEYE<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
According to Dr. Keisuke Ikehata, an associate professor of civil engineering at Texas State University, runoff can also wash sediments and contaminants such as oil, grease, and paint into the river, but “the more immediate health concern for swimmers is generally exposure to microorganisms that may cause gastrointestinal illness.”<\/p>\n
“For the Colorado River\/LCRA reservoir system, dam releases are part of flood management and are not necessarily a source of contamination. The larger water-quality concern is the runoff entering waterways from the surrounding watershed,” he wrote. <\/p>\n
How do I know when it’s safe to swim?<\/p>\n
“It takes anywhere between a few days to several weeks, depending on the extent of the flooding and extent of the pollution, for bodies of water to clarify enough for safe swimming,” said Ikehata. “Make sure to check or reach out to the authorities who monitor the water quality. They do the microbial testing, and they can possibly tell if the water is safe.”<\/p>\n
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has a Surface Water Quality Segment Viewer<\/a> for the public to check the quality of bodies of water that TCEQ monitors. <\/p>\nCBS Austin reached out to the TCEQ, but no representative was available for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 Water is making its way down the Highland Lakes system as floodgates at Wirtz, Starcke,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-377975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}