peter
“We know three people in our family and friend circles who have been directly infected with E.coli from simply swimming in one of Dublin Bay’s beaches. We live locally and we always considered ourselves lucky to have such a beautiful place at our doorstep. Our family regularly goes swimming, sailing or paddle-boarding. We are active users of the sea; just like thousands of others. Very few cities have a bay like Dublin bay, and we always thought about it as something to appreciate and protect. So when these incidents happened and when we saw the beaches being closed more frequently around the end of August, we began to wonder if we could find the data as to why they had to make this decision. After some research, we found out that they had measured two pathogens. The levels for them should be below 50, but they were around 1300 some days, and they even went up to 3200 a few occasions! These dates occurred around the days of heavy rainfall, causing the outdated treatment plant in Ringsend to release sewage water directly into Dublin Bay waters. We think this is totally unacceptable in our day and age. It turned out that water samples are being taken every 5 to 10 days, which is not frequent enough. We believe that sampling needs to be done every day, especially around the beaches that people use daily. At the moment, when the water quality is poor, you will not find any warning signs on the beaches, except when it’s so bad that they have to close them. Otherwise, you have to go to a webpage or look it up on social media to find out if it is safe to swim on that particular day. In response to this, my daughter and I have started a page and launched a petition outlining all the issues we are facing. We believe that the protection of the Dublin Bay’s habitat and wildlife should be our utmost priority. To make that change, we need your help.”
Find out more on this link :
https://www.change.org/p/environmental-protection-agency-sos-save-our-sea-in-dublin-bay