Health Unit News Archive

A FIFTH of all Lake Ontario Beaches are currently posted unsafe according to Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

Meanwhile, here in Kingston, there is still no beach report avaiable from our lard-ass Health Unit.

Shorts:

TWO ENGINEERING JOBS at MetalCraft Marine

STILL no beach report from our lard-ass Health Unit.

NAVAL RE-ENACTMENT this weekend.

KINGSTON'S FIREBOAT is named the Thomas H. Patterson.

SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK because there's no beach report avaiable from our lard-ass Health Unit.

It's only 31 degrees outside today. This has been forecast for quite some time.

There's been no signal that the KFLA Health Unit will be making-up the miles they are behind Toronto in beach report timeliness and data quality.

IDIOTIC BEACH REPORT from the KFLA Public Health Unit.

Go ahead, read it.

Who writes this crap? Who is it written-for? Er, which beaches are open, or closed, or what? This is bullshit.

Hey, KFLA Public Health unit, give us obvious in-context links to the complete list of beaches in the KFLA area posted as unsafe for swimmers.

Just like that.

Not long confusing link-free paragraphs then, far from there, a link that doesn't-look-like-a-link, out-of-context, which few people will scroll-to and find, and fewer will click. Can you find it? Look again.

Seriously, how hard could that be? This is so basic.

This isn't news. For too long the KFLA Public Health Unit has been an embarassment to our waterfront.

Dr Ian Gemill, enough self-serving verbiage about beaches. Do us a favour: either clean-house or retire.

THERE'S APPARENTLY NO IMPROVEMENT since last July to the so-called "Beach Report" we're getting from the Health Unit.

What's worse, it's nearly mid-June and the City of Kingston is still not listing beach quality information, or links to beach quality information, on its Environment or Recreation landing pages.

The main problem with our Health Unit's Beach Report remains the lack of disclosure which is in stark contrast with the quality of beach information other areas are getting.

Here's the data we need to see:

• The exact date the sample was collected.
• The specific level of E.coli found, as they do in Hastings & Prince Edward Counties and Toronto.
• How, exactly, was the sample collected? Was it from a boat perhaps hundreds of feet off-the-beach, or within a few yards of the waterline where children actually swim?
• The sampling history for each location so the propensity and volatility of E.coli contamination can be reckoned.

Because just "Open" or "Closed" isn't nearly good enough.

FINALLY the KFL&A Health Unit has a dedicated beach report web page.

Getting that took over a year. Think: pulling teeth.

Another plus: The Health Unit's page lists 41 beaches, covering a wide area.

By contrast, the City of Kingston's "Environment" page lists just 11 city beaches plus Big Sandy Bay.

But the Health Unit lists four swimming spots in the City that, for some reason, don't appear on the City website:

• The PUC dock at the foot of Collingwood street,
• the Collins Bay Pier,
• Lemoine Point which, oddly, the Health Unit classifies under "Cataraqui Conservation Authority". This area is within the City of Kingston, and should be listed as such.
• What they call "Lake Ontario Hospital", which is either behind the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, or Breakwater Park. We're supposed to guess.

So the City and the Health Unit currently aren't on the same page when it comes to keeping swimmers healthy.

Downsides: The Health Unit and the City of Kingston can't seem to agree on names for some beaches. Respect for our beaches surely starts with referring to them properly in official communications.

Here's what needs to drastically improve next because this still isn't good enough. Vital information still isn't being disclosed, like:

• The date of the sample was collected.
• The specific level of E.coli found, as they do in Hastings & Prince Edward Counties.
• How, exactly, was the sample collected? Was it from a boat perhaps hundreds of feet off the beach, or within a few yards of the waterline where children actually swim?

Related: A swimmable Lake Ontario, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper Podcast from June 5, 2008. This covers, in detail, what's wrong with the current state of beach reporting around Lake Ontario.

The bottom line: thanks for finally creating a web page, but we really need way better information to make choices. See, for example, the Hastings & Prince Edward Counties Health Unit beach report.

The CITY OF KINGSTON BEACH REPORT continues to be a complete screwup.

Boys and girls, how hard is it to maintain a simple list, as inadequate as that is compared to the extensive service lake swimmers get in Toronto?

Moreover the City of Kingston's beach report is still linking to a non-existent page at the Health Unit's old website address.

Related: Another summer of ad-hoc Kingston beach reports from June 23rd.

ANOTHER SUMMER OF AD-HOC KINGSTON BEACH REPORTS, it seems.

The Health Unit Communications Officer, Mr Justin Chenier, has made it very clear: there are currently no plans for a link, nevermind a dedicated page, about local beaches on the Health Unit website. Don't even think about it; it's not on the radar.

If you need the latest on local beaches, you'll need to root through the Health Unit's news dispatches, essentially fending for yourself, interpreting the fragmentary disclosures therein. Assuming you find it at all.

Also, this Health Unit declares beaches unsafe, but does not explicitly declare them safe again. So faced with, say, a 5-day old beach report, what should one conclude?

Alternately, you could consult this City of Kingston web page (found via "Residents", then "Environment", not "Recreation") which provides a list, but with no date-of-update and no other cues, so information freshness is always in doubt here. This same page showed Lake Ontario Park Beach and Rotary Park Beach closed for most of the winter, a sign that keeping this list fresh certainly wasn't any sort of priority last year.

The City web page currently links to the Health Unit's old website address (http://www.healthunit.on.ca/programs/environ.html) which, like all references to the old website, redirects to the current home page where, assuming the beach news hasn't scrolled-off, you might find more beach-related information in the 4-item news-area found there.

This is all very sloppy. There's no possible excuse for this.

Now look at Toronto: they do it better. Toronto has:

• several dedicated pages about its beaches,
• detailed recent, and not-so-recent, quantitative data on specific sampling results,
• the location of beach warning signs so you'll know where to look,
• a daily beach overview of the region including a general interactive map leading to beach-specific maps, and
• a hotline anyone can call, (416-392-7161), to hear a recording of the very latest water quality conditions.

Here in Kingston, don't even think of making suggestions for the Health Unit website: they are evidently only interested in hearing themselves tell you how great the KFL&A Health Unit website is. You'll be talking with God's gift to local beach users. That's got to change.

Related:

• Health Unit snoozing from a year ago, June 23 2007.
• Finally we have an online beach report, from August 24th 2007. We've made zero forward progress in the 10-months since.
• A swimmable Lake Ontario (June 5, 2008), an excellent, recent, and directly-related podcast from Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

All this is emblematic of how much our municipal and local bureaucracies, at every level, need a swift kick-in-the-butt when it comes to respecting our waterfront and its users.

See also: You snooze, you lose -- Kingston's disappearing waterfront. This beach-report situation is more evidence that some nine-to-fivers among us are evidently auto-stumbling through their waterfront-related dossiers.

Now ROTARY PARK BEACH IS POSTED CLOSED due to high E. coli levels (again from The Whig Standard, and not the Health Unit website).

Last year, Rotary Park Beach was closed in late July, which at the time was Kingston's first beach closure in 14 years. That closure forced the nearby Collins Bay Yacht Club to stop in-water instruction until the beach re-opened.

What the heck is polluting our west-end beaches?

LAKE ONTARIO PARK BEACH is closed due to high E. coli levels (from The Whig Standard).

The Health Unit website? Lame.

We have more on Kingston's rock and sand beaches

NOTHING ABOUT BEACHES ON THE HEALTH UNIT WEBSITE.

But their website claims they inspect beaches. Just don't assume they make results available or anything.

The Whig today has a beach safety news story and, apparently, the local beach safety story is good for now. Perhaps one must phone? Better call during business hours, Monday through Friday, because otherwise they are closed.

BEACH INFORMATION WHERE? Wondering if a particular local beach is open or closed? The KFL&A Health Unit website is no help. First you must guess that their news page is where this information is kept, and then you must guess if a news item is current since their items are not dated. What's worse, the beach information is buried in a narrative paragraph which must be interpreted, and some of the beach-closure related news items mention some beaches while omitting others.

Searching for "Beaches" or "Beach Closing" on the City of Kingston website yields dysfunctional results.

What this city needs is a web page that clearly shows us the status of all local beaches at a glance.