Water quality on Cedar River in Floyd County is ‘reasonably clean’

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

Charles City Watershed Project Coordinator Doug Johnson said that most of the time, the water in the Cedar River in Floyd County is “reasonably clean.”

“Overall, it’s good,” Johnson said. “I wouldn’t drink the water (straight out of the river), and I would take a bath after I’d gone swimming or kayaking in the Cedar River, but for the most part, if you got a little on you, it’s not a big deal.”

Johnson and Randy Vandeventer of the Floyd County chapter of the Izaak Walton League received funding and supplies to monitor E. coli bacteria levels this summer in the Cedar River and the streams in the Charles City watershed.

Vandeveter said the Mower County chapter in Minnesota received a national grant from the Izaak Walton League to take water samples on the Cedar River there, and the Floyd County’s chapter is the next chapter south, and “they wanted to include Iowa.”

Since the start of the summer, the two have been testing spots on the river in Floyd County for both water clarity and presence of E. coli, which is an indicator of either human or animal waste in a waterway. They have also been testing several of the main streams that flow into the Cedar River.

“Overall, we haven’t really found a consistently high level anywhere,” Johnson said.

Johnson said that there have been instances of some higher levels of E. coli after major rain events, which can be expected, due to runoff from fields and septic systems.

“It never got to the point where it was high enough that we needed to send it in for DNA analysis,” Johnson said. “We would do that to try to find out if it’s swine or cattle or human waste, but we never had to do that.”

Johnson said it was important to monitor E. coli bacteria in the upper Cedar River given the popularity here of human contact sports such as kayaking and canoeing. One of the spots the two men sample at is the Main Street Bridge, just below the dam and just above Charles City’s popular whitewater area.

“It’s not perfect,” Johnson said. “There is some E. coli that’s probably coming from livestock and human waste upstream, but we’re not seeing a major increase here in Floyd County.”

Johnson said the streams in the watershed run about the same as the main river, and said he would continue to test them. The Floyd County Izaak Walton League has approved a grant request submitted by Johnson to do additional sampling in the Charles City Watershed, in order to expand on the work he’s already doing.

“That’s great community involvement,” he said.

Johnson said he plans to use the grant to sample five additional sites to narrow down any E. coli hot spots.