Eew! Bad water: Why won't officials just tell the public?

Swim at your own risk?

Surely Missouri can and should do better.

It turns out that human waste gets spilled into Lake of the Ozarks – a busy place this time of year – fairly often. It turns out that state officials know about it but choose not to tell the public about this obvious health risk. Instead, they disagree about who should bear the bad news.

And guess what? There’s no requirement that they tell the public at all. As is often the case with outrages involving the public welfare, the scandal isn’t the illegal stuff that is neither stopped nor punished. It is instead what’s legal in the first place.

Millions of Americans get sick every year from swimming in water contaminated with raw sewage. It’s E. coli, and that means nausea, diarrhea and stomach cramps. And you don’t even have to swim and get a mouthful of water to get sick. You can be wading or fishing and be exposed.

So should we really need Congress itself to step in and order public warnings within 24 hours of a sewage leak into a widely used lake? No, we shouldn’t – but that might be the only solution this time.