With temperatures still flirting with triple digits into September, Austinites continue to try to beat the heat by cooling off in the city’s many bodies of water. A statewide report released last month by nonprofit Environment Texas identified contamination in some of the area’s regularly frequented sites like Walnut Creek and Bull Creek. However, the city’s department in charge of managing the waterways told the Chronicle there is no new cause for concern.
According to the data, 16 of 22 Travis County waterways included in the study had potentially unsafe levels of bacterial contamination on at least one day of testing during 2024 and 2025. Compiled from publicly available information from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and local agencies across the state, 59% of the tested locations throughout Texas were flagged for contamination. Yet figures for some of Austin’s most popular swimming holes, like Barton Springs, Lake Austin, and Lake Travis, were absent from the statewide report, despite the information being readily available, Austin Watershed Protection staff told the Chronicle.
“This is not every bit of data that’s available in the state, but it gives you a kind of snapshot of the problem,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “Next time we do this report, I’m hoping to dig deeper [and] … capture as many waterways as possible.”…