Bathing waters season has started. So is it safe to go into the water? |
This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.
So that’s the Bathing Waters season started, though many of us have been swimming in the waters in and around Scotland all year, wind or rain, cold or teeth-chatteringly Baltic.
It’s around about now that we have that Scotland has that conversation again about how safe it is to go into the water – and by that I don’t mean risk-free in terms of tides and currents, but whether the water is clean enough not to make you horribly ill.
There's a key place to go for this information: the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) website, which publishes the monitoring it does on Scotland's bathing waters sites between June and September.
At Ballachulish on Loch Leven that monitoring is now a jubilantly hot topic, as the site enters its first year of bathing waters designation, making it the 90th site in Scotland, and the result of a committed and hard-won campaign by Loch Leven Sea Savers.
Already they have a vague idea of what the results are likely to be because they have been testing it themselves. Over the past year, their citizen science monitoring has, according to the group, “shown that water quality was generally good, but occasional pollution spikes were recorded, particularly during periods of higher river flow and after heavy rainfall”.
I know what it takes in terms of sheer effort and persistence to make something like this happen having been one of many involved in a similar successful bid at Wardie Bay in Edinburgh.
Essentially, bathing waters are coastal and inland surface waters where a large number of people bathe and that is regularly monitored for the bacteria that might make humans sick. That monitoring is how we swimmers, and other water users, get a clearer picture of how clean or dirty our water is – though there are other clues to be had, like........