Toronto has been experiencing some serious heat over these past few days, and everyone knows one of the best ways to cool off when a heat wave sets in is by hitting up one of the city's many beautiful beaches.
Toronto is home to 11 supervised public beaches, eight of which are blue flag certified this year, and the city regularly conducts inspections of E. coli levels to see which ones are safe for swimming on any given day.
Unfortunately, despite the heat and humidity, only two beaches have been given the green light for swimming in recent days: Woodbine Beach and Bluffer's Beach Park.
Both of these beaches were sampled on June 27 and were found to have lower levels of E. Coli than the maximum amount deemed safe for swimming, which is 100 Escherichia coli cells per 100 ml of water.
Sunnyside Beach, Cherry Beach and Kew Balmy Beach, on the other hand, were all deemed unsafe after they exceeded the maximum levels over the weekend.
Sunnyside was found to have 253 E. coli cells per 100 ml of water, Cherry had 180 and Kew Balmy had 372.
E. coli levels for Marie Curtis Park East Beach, Hanlan's Point Beach, Gibraltar Point Beach, Centre Island Beach and Ward's Island Beach haven't been reported in recent days and these beaches therefore haven't been labelled as safe or unsafe for swimming by the city.
The city does warn that swimming is not recommended during and after storms, floods or heavy rainfall, and that cloudy water can be an indicator of high levels of bacteria that may pose a risk to human health.
With plenty of rain in the forecast for the next few days, be sure to keep an eye on those E. coli levels before heading out for a quick dip.
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