What's up at the lake (or river)? There's a website for that

Minnesotans who want to know more about their lakes will have one place on the internet to visit that brings all the information together: The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's new website.

• Link: How's The Water?

"We didn't have kind of the one place where we could send people and say, here in a relatively small number of screens is an overall description of how the water is doing in Minnesota," said Glenn Skuta, of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

The web site allows anyone to look up the details all the state's water -- lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands and groundwater. The details include water quality and pollutants, whether the body of water is good for swimming and whether people should be careful about eating fish from it.

Officials say that, overall, Minnesota's water has improved. For example, it's rare to find untreated raw sewage flowing into rivers. But they say there's still a lot of work to be done to reduce water pollution.