TULSA, Okla. (KTUL) — If there’s one thing you absolutely do not want to do if you’re out in the Arkansas river having a good time…
“The big thing is don’t swallow the water,” said Dr. Donald Barney, running down the list of symptoms if you get E. coli poisoning.
“The cramping, vomiting, fever, getting dehydrated from the diarrhea,” he said.
Things to keep in mind on the heels of an analysis by Tulsan Charles Pratt who crunched the numbers over the past year of water quality testing on the river and found that during the peak months of use from May to October…
“During those months in 2024, May through October, the bacteria counts failed to meet the safe criteria, failed, 92% of the time,” he said.
Which he argues, makes trying to use the water quality dashboard as a predictor of safety, futile.
“What this boils down to is you cannot depend on the dashboard data to ever guarantee it’s going to be safe even right after they tested it. It could change the next day,” said Pratt.
“The river is flowing so when we test today it takes 24 hours to get the results back. The test we got today is all the way down river now. We got a new test, and that’s where one of the problems is because we don’t know right now what it is,” said Dr. Barney.
One amenity that Dr. Barney would like to see installed along the river to help increase safety? Showers.
“I wish they had a shower when people were going swimming in that lake because you need to wash that E.coli off your body as soon as you can,” he said.
