Melissa Schussman and Maria Steadmon, along with Dr. McLellan were interviewed and their work was featured in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article.
On a late July afternoon, with temperatures pushing 90 degrees, about 100 beachgoers spread across the sand and water at Bay View’s South Shore Beach, undeterred by Lake Michigan’s brisk, mid-60s water.
Parents lingered at the waterline, kids darted in and out of the shallows, more confident swimmers fanned out into deeper water and others settled up the sand with a beach read in hand.
The scene felt ordinary – summer along Lake Michigan – but it marked a quiet turnaround decades in the making.
It’s scene now possible at South Shore Beach, which reopened about a year ago after being moved farther south. Long plagued by elevated E. coli, a fecal bacteria associated with humans and animals, the beach was often closed for swimming and earned a reputation as one of the worst beaches in the country.
Now, it’s turned a corner.
Data shared exclusively with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences show consistently cleaner water, with the new swimming site up to three times more likely to stay below E. coli limits during the 2025 and 2026 swim seasons.