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Bacteria levels close Olcott Beach again

The beach will reopen once the E. coli levels go back down to what is deemed safe for swimming.

BURT, N.Y. — This week's water quality sampling results for Olcott Beach came back on Tuesday, which wasn't good news.

The beach is closed again for now and will remain closed until bacteria levels go back down. This is the fifth closure of this beach this summer.

"We test for E.coli bacteria, which is an indicator of fecal, or waste matter, from an animal, and if there's an exceedance above a certain level, the water is deemed unfit for swimming," said Paul Dicky, Director of Environmental Health for the Niagara County Department of Health.

Dicky says this year's closures aren't out of the ordinary and have happened between Tuesday and Saturday, so the beach has opened for at least part of every weekend. The beach is only open when lifeguards are here, and since no lifeguards are there on Tuesdays, no one lost a beach day today.

So who is likely causing this problem?

"That is an excellent question. It's never 100% sure to say on any given day what is a source of the bacteria. In the past, we've done PCR DNA tests to try to determine what animal originated the E. coli bacteria. Mostly the results came back as a ruminant. (What does that mean?) A ruminant is an animal that grazes. So that could be a cow, sheep, goat, elk, deer, llama, something like that," said Dicky.

While they can't be certain, they think they might know who the culprit is.

"They said we don't think we're looking at cattle. So Niagara County doesn't have a lot of sheep and goats, we don't have elk and llama. So we do have a lot of deer, but nobody can quite say how a deer can be affecting the beach, so we're really unsure on how this is happening," said Dicky.

So, they will come back out on Wednesday to test more water samples and if they come back at safe levels, the beach will be allowed to reopen.

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