David Levy – Sand, Sea and Sewage : Are English sea bathing waters safe? – Aug 20
It has been some time since I personally felt there was a task that we stood some chance in winning.
Most of the time the chips are stacked against you, with the result that you find yourself campaigning without much hope of ever winning the day. That has changed in our latest work on bathing water standards and health-related spin offs for our society.
I have to thank Stephen Eades and Brian Morgan who have worked their collective socks off to produce a Marinet report — Sand, Sea and Sewage — that is most shocking, and it demands that the people of the U.K call for improved sewage treatment, along with genuinely clean bathing waters and good beach hygiene standards from this decade on.
Traditionally the national water companies who deal with our human waste have been operating to practices which have changed little over the decades. The ‘system’ has been fundamentally lazy, and the proof of this is that our bathing water rank 25th out of 30 amongst all the European countries measuring their bathing water quality.
We can do much better and make the bathing waters so much more appealing for home holidays. Now that is a target worthy of our efforts and can be easily attained if all the sewage works install high levels of ultra-violet treatment of all sewage. This will destroy the pathogenspathogens A virus, bacterium or parasite which causes disease is a pathogen. Disease causing pathogens live in the environment, and both humans and animals are hosts to them. Pathogenic viruses, bacteria and parasites are present in sewage, originating from humans and animals, and thus it is essential that sewage is given proper treatment in order to disable (kill) these pathogens before the end-products of sewage treatment (solids and water effluent) are returned to the environment. that cause illness in bathers.
For many years the water companies sit like they do on the Monopoly Board, paying out dividends to investors. If the companies spent more time looking at how they could deliver a circular closed-loop system then they could be delivering a better product of purer water and treated waste for our people.
Never has this been more important than now when toilet-sourced COVID19 is also being discharged into our bathing waters untreated. We have the knowledge, but we do not as yet have the will.
Shame on you water companies for doing such a poor job, and allowing us to have such bathing waters for our population to swim in.
Now we see the truth when international travel is being curtailed, and as we look instead to home waters for our holidays.
25th out of 30 in the bathing water quality league! We deserve better, we deserve healthier and we demand it now.
Join us and Surfers Against Sewage to put the pressure on for cleaner bathing waters.
David Levy
