New beach designations and signage for the bathing water season
The Scottish bathing water season got underway last weekend (1 June 2008), with 20 additional designated beaches being sampled for water quality and a new prediction system being installed in the Borders.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) began its annual water quality monitoring of official bathing waters in Scotland from Sunday 1 June. As well as the beaches it monitored last year, SEPA will expand its programme to include the new official bathing waters recently announced by the Scottish Government and SEPA’s monitoring of Scotland’s bathing waters will increase by more than 20% overall this summer.
SEPA is constantly reviewing its work on bathing waters and has expanded other initiatives that will help implement the new Bathing Water Regulations recently passed by Scottish Parliament. SEPA is extending its water quality prediction service with the addition of a new prediction sign at Eyemouth beach, in the Borders. This means there will now be 11 beach locations across Scotland where daily predictions of water quality will appear on electronic signs, with the same information also available on SEPA’s website. The new sign at Eyemouth is due to be operational in June 2008. All the signs will feature additional environmental messages for the first time too.
Dr Calum McPhail, Environmental Quality Manager for SEPA, said: “SEPA will also extend the use of Microbial Source Tracking (MST) methods, which are based on DNA analysis, in its investigations into sample failures. MST will be used to assist in tracking the sources of any bacteria pollution found in the bathing waters. When sources are identified, this information can be used to determine the cause of the pollution and necessary control measures.”
Pre-season sampling has already been carried out by SEPA and included the new designated sites. The results so far have been positive.
Dr McPhail continues: “We are pleased with the way the pre-season sampling has gone so far and hope that these good results continue throughout the summer. We know that bathing waters results are influenced by weather conditions, and there will still be occasions, particularly following heavy rainfall, when short pollution events can occur. The wet weather conditions were a big contributing factor to the failures of some of the beaches last year. We hope that we have a drier summer this year.
“SEPA will continue to work with all our partners to ensure bathing water quality and information provision is as high as possible.”
Scotland has 80 identified bathing waters, which SEPA tests annually between 1 June and 15 Sept.
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